The ‘Summary of Key SSR Indicators’ states, “It will increase the share of education budget from 3.5% [sic] of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in base year 2007/08 and 2008/09 to 4% [sic] by 2015/16.” The international benchmark for public sector education budget is 6 percent of a nation’s GDP and 20 percent of the national budget. The share of education budget in fiscal year 2009/10 is 3.5 percent of the GDP.
It has not only failed to respect the international standard, but the amount has also become insufficient in the context of growing number of children enrolled in schools and meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015, which is just four years and four months away from today.
The plan aims at increasing the share of education budget to 18.1 percent of the national budget by fiscal year 2013/14. This clearly indicates that it won’t reach 20 percent even after 2015 at the given rate of increment. And the national budgets allocated to education sector for the past three fiscal years have hovered around 16 percent, despite the fact that the education sector absorbs the largest pie of the national budget.
There are two apparent reasons for the need of raising education budget. First, to meet the growing need resultant of increasing number of children enrolled in school. Second, the spiraling inflation taking place over the years. The government may argue that it has increased the share of education budget every year, but the increment does not meet the rising cost and the soaring inflation.
The next target of the policy document, among others, is to minimize the student-teacher ratio (STR). Currently, the STR stands at 1:41 and 1:37 at basic and secondary levels of education respectively. The government has planned to bring them down to 1:34 and 1:25 respectively in fiscal year 2015/16.
School Sector Reform Plan is starkly silent on private schools run through different models. And the title of the plan is SSRP. In fact, it should be spelled out as “Public School Sector Reform Plan”.
The practice elsewhere in the world is that the STR in the preliminary or basic education should be smaller and that can be a little bit bigger in the higher grades of secondary level education. The objective of having fewer students at primary level is to fortify their foundation and stemming dropout by providing more care to the children.
Likewise, the projected pass percentages in School Leaving Certificate (SLC) and the Higher Secondary Education (HSE) examinations are very crucial. In 2009/10, the percentages are 64 and 28 respectively. And the policy targets to raise them to 75 percent and 50 percent by 2015/16.
It is a flaw in the education policy and has raised serious questions relating to the accountability. This is an apparently short-sighted step. First, who are accountable to such a low pass rate in those two important examinations? Second, the targets are ridiculous. If you want to make just 50 percent student pass out in the HSE and 75 percent in the SLC examinations, how do you achieve the MDGs and Education For ALL (EFA) goals by 2015?
The explicit meaning of the targets is that teachers, school management committees (SMCs), parents-teachers’ associations and the concerned bodies of the government can go scot-free, if a huge number of students fail the HSE and SLC examinations. As the policy is prepared basically by the government officials, it does not have a provision for penalizing the non-performing or minimally performing schools and teachers. The government will argue that it has set realistic targets. But that would be a completely flippant answer.
How can one achieve a better result by setting a poor target?
In the same way, the classification of age groups in terms of acquiring literacy is quite confusing. There are three groups: Age groups 15-24; 6 plus years; and 15 plus years. Another most intriguing aspect of the SSRP is that it aims to achieve 95 percent, 90 percent and 75 percent literacy rates by 2015/16 up from the present 78 percent, 76 percent and 50 percent respectively.
While setting the targets, the plan has cited National Plan of Action, EFA and the Interim Plan. The SSRP at the outset explains, “The SSRP is partly a continuation of earlier programs such as EFA, Secondary Education Support Program (SESP), Community School Support Program (CSSP) and Teacher Education Project, and partly a beginning of new reforms characterized by strategic interventions such as the restructuring of the school education, improvement of the quality of education, and institutionalization of performance accountability.”
“To ensure equitable access to quality education through a rights-based approach (RBA) and promotion of child-friendly environment in schools,” is one of the goals of the plan. It is quite commendable that the government has adopted an RBA to attain the goal. However, what a lay person does not understand from the figure is that who those 5 percent, 10 percent and 25 percent people are and whose responsibility it is to provide education for them. Who fulfills their right to education? Forget about quality. The literal meaning of the phrase “Education For All” is education to each individual. So how can you make every individual literate and every school-going- age child put into schools by 2015 when you set a target of achieving 95 percent literacy? Will someone educate me on it?
The SSRP is starkly silent on private schools run through different models. And the title of the plan is SSRP. In fact ,it should be spelled out as “Public School Sector Reform Plan” or PSSRP as an acronym. How can an overarching school sector education policy remain silent on private schools with their ever-increasing role in all levels of education be called an SSRP? First, let’s incorporate the private system of education in the document. And if we cannot do so, let’s change the title of the policy to PSSRP.
Now, let’s have a look at the provision of scholarship outlined in the plan. The SSRP has planned to distribute Rs 350 in scholarship per year to all Dalit students. Inflation has remained double digit for the past few years. It has been moderately presented by the central bank over the years, which stands at 11.6 percent this fiscal year. The trend is sure to continue in the years to come, rendering the purchasing power of the people who live in the fringe of the society further weaker.
Against such a backdrop and imminent stagflation, the students who receive Rs 350 a year till 2015 will only be able to buy just a few pencils and exercise books. Now, one can imagine how the girl students from Karnali zone, a remote place where prices of goods and services are extremely high, can make use of Rs 1,000 a year scholarship. What about the fate of the boy students who do not receive even that amount of scholarship?
The policy has failed to see this simple arithmetic. This also means that economists were not consulted while formulating the plan. If seen from economic point of view, there might appear other serious flaws in the policy.
Another enigmatic aspect of the SSRP is the provision of scholarship to 50 percent girl children. It has been clearly stated in the policy that the scholarship would be distributed by the SMCs on the basis of the need identified by them. What the policy has failed to realize is that almost all the children who attend public school are from poor families. Those who are better off even among the poor strive to send their children to private schools, mushrooming across the country.
Teachers’ organizations right from the beginning have been expressing their dissatisfaction toward the government for not involving them in the consultative process while formulating the policy. That’s why they have been resistant to the implementation of this policy, terming it as fait accompli. This will have a far-reaching consequence in the public sector school education of Nepal.
Moreover, the teachers’ community has been strongly opposing the provision of hiring the head teachers of public school on a four-year contract through a competition in writing a proposal on improving a particular school. The provision of the SMC hiring the head teacher has already been opposed by the teachers’ community, questioning the competence of the SMC.
The next and most important issue is the ‘communitization’ of public schools. The stakeholders prefer public schools to be overseen by the SMC but not handed over to the community itself. The stakeholders have taken it as a regressive step of the state towards withdrawing itself from its responsibility. They have vehemently opposed this provision stating that it contravenes with the spirit and letters of the Interim Constitution of Nepal which has enshrined the right to education as a fundamental right of its citizens.
(Writer works for ActionAid Nepal.)
ramsharan.sedhai@gmail.com
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