According to recent statistics, forty-two percent of the students enrolled in grade one fail to graduate to grade two. While 27 percent choose to repeat the same grade, 15 per cent drop out. [break]
“The state bears an annual loss of around Rs 10 billion owing to this,” said deputy secretary Hari Lamsal, chief of Program Section at the Education Department.
Around 1.4 million students are enrolled each year in grade one in state-funded public schools. The number is double their actual capacity.
The state invests around Rs 6,000 for every grade one student.
The number of students currently enrolled in the primary level is 4.9 million, some 1.4 million over its actual capacity. Nearly half of them are grade one students.
According to Lamsal, the functioning of public schools fall apart at the primary level, particularly grade one.
“The biggest problem is that the teachers do not deliver. Their world is highly politicized,” said Bed Prakash Neupane, president of Community School Teachers´ National Network.
To make matters worse, the schools do not open for the mandatory 180 days as stipulated by the education act. “Students do not even learn an alphabet any given day,” claimed Lamsal, adding that the state should ensure that the students learn something in school so as to be able to graduate to higher grades.
Primary education accounts for a major chunk of the total budget in education. Ninety percent of the education budget goes for teachers´ salary. Ironically, 50 per cent of it is goes for primary level teachers.
There are around 80,000 primary teachers in the country while those for lower secondary and secondary level are only around 29,000. Current teacher-student ratio in the primary level is around 1:60, which ought to 1:40 in mountainous region, 1:45 in the hills and 1:50 in the Tarai.
The government has been striving to narrow this gap under a single policy -- of rearranging quotas. While quota redeployment is said to have been hindered by politics, the state has already added to its financial woes by recruiting around 40,000 new teachers in relief quotas over the last five years. The government scrapped the provision of relief quotas this year after it made matters worse.
In 1999, Nepal had agreed with donors to redeploy teachers before finally recruiting new teachers. While it also adopted liberal promotion policy, there has hardly been any satisfactory progress over recent years, say officials.
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