The progress of school education in Uttar Pradesh

Uttar Pradesh had some noteworthy successes in school education in 2015. The year saw three significant positive interventions: (a) the STIR India programme that is publishing and celebrating the classroom innovations of government school teachers, which has motivated teachers; (b) the SCERT’s survey of learning has led to helpful diagnosis of the problems of low learning levels so that remedying measures can now be planned; and (c) the start of the implementation of the RTE Act’s section 12 which allows poor and disadvantaged children to access private schools.

Several UP students figured on the ICSE, ISC and CBSE national merit lists.

The national school rankings based on the actual board exam results of 2015 show the state capital Lucknow to be a big educational hub (bigger than Dehradun for example) with seven of the top 25 ISC schools of India as a whole being in the single city of Lucknow.

However, the state continued to face major educational challenges in 2015. Autumn brought three pieces of bad news in the education sector.

First, in August 2015, the Allahabad high court, lamenting the poor quality and neglect of government schools , ordered the chief secretary of the state to ensure that all government-paid servants send their own children to government schools, opining that only then will officials pay attention to improving the quality of the government schools.

Secondly, the NCERT’s summary report of the National Achievement Survey of class 5 released in September 2015 showed that the performance of UP students had fallen very substantially between 2011 and 2015. This statistic seemed to justify the high court’s worries on the neglect of school quality.

Thirdly, in September 2015, the Allahabad high court cancelled the appointment of 177,000 individuals as government school teachers in the state, on the basis that they had not passed the mandatory Teacher Eligibility Test (TET).

The worry was that incompetent teachers could compromise the quality of basic education in the state. In December, the Supreme Court stayed the high court order.

Many educational issues were raised in 2015, from which both government education authorities and private schools should learn in order to improve matters in 2016.

For instance, the process of admission of disadvantaged children into private schools started very late (in early April) so only a few applications could be processed, and many private schools resisted since they said their seats were all filled as the academic year had already begun.

Many problems were discovered in RTE Section 12 implementation too: (a) there was ambiguity about whether RTE admissions into private schools shall begin from preprimary or class 1 level – a subject of recent court judgments in Maharashtra and Karnataka; (b) whether private schools should keep 25% of their total capacity in class 1 vacant for six months till September 30 every year, in the so-called ‘extended period of admission’, despite there being no reimbursement for keeping seats vacant; (c) whether district authorities could send children for admission without notifying schools publicly, contrary to the provisions of the UP RTE Rules 2011; (d) whether a class of 40 enrolled students

MANY EDUCATIONAL ISSUES WERE RAISED IN 2015, FROM WHICH BOTH GOVT EDUCATION AUTHORITIES AND PRIVATE SCHOOLS SHOULD LEARN

in a government school will be considered ‘full’ even if many of the enrolled children do not attend school for months; (e) what shall be the legally correct upper limit of reimbursement to private schools under the RTE Act, in the absence of any transparent calculation of the per pupil expenditure in the government school system, etc. These issues need to be resolved in 2016.

The UP government also tried to fulfil its responsibilities under the RTE Act by establishing government schools in more neighbourhoods as mandated by section 6 of the RTE Act. However, it is not particularly wise to create more of the kinds of schools people are abandoning.

In the five years since the implementation of the RTE Act, i.e. between 2010-11 to 2014-15, as per official DISE data, the UP government created 9448 new government elementary schools, but over the same period, total enrolment in UP government schools fell by 25.9 lakh students, and average enrolment per school fell from 130 students per government school to a mere 106 students per government school.

Moreover, in the same fiveyear period, the number of ‘small’ government schools (those with 20 or fewer students) increased by nearly 1000 schools, from 4151 to 5135 small schools in UP.

These ‘small’ schools had an average of six pupils per teacher, a per-pupil-cost (on teacher salary alone) of `77,690 per pupil in 2014-15, and a total salary expenditure of Rs 538 crore on these 5135 small schools in 2014-15.

Between them, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Chattisgarh in 2014-15 closed down and merged 23,900 such ‘small’ government schools with nearby other government schools, in order to stop the grotesque economic inefficiency in running such unviably small schools.

This exodus from and emptying of the government schools, is mirrored by a massive expansion of private schooling over the same fiveyear period. In this period, 32,524 new private elementary schools were established, and total enrolment in private schools increased by 74.7 lakh students.

This desertion of public schools and move towards private schools is tragic since only the relatively better-off children can afford fee-charging schools. The focus in 2016 must be on massively improving the quality of government schools where 70% of the children study.