The last resort

The importance of improving the public education system in Nepal

In recent years, Nepal has made impressive gains in basic education. Net enrollment at the primary level has increased to over 95 percent from only 64 percent in 1990. Similarly, the literacy rate for 15-24 year olds has increased from 36 percent in 1990 to over 80 percent in 2010/2011.

Despite these gains over the last two decades, the quality of education – especially in the public school system in Nepal remains a major challenge to overall development and the improvement of society.

Some recent reports illustrate the gravity of the situation. Even though about 1.6 million students enrolled in grade one in the year 2005/06, just over 400,000 students made it to grade 10 and appeared on the SLC this year. This means that 3 out of 4 children who enroll drop out of the school system before reaching grade 10.

Even those who make it to grade 10 are not likely to finish secondary school. For instance, the national graduation rate in SLC (School Level Certificate) examinations is only about 45%. While the national average is low, the students from public school system graduate at an even lower rate. In 2014, only about 28% of those who took the SLC from public schools graduated while over 93% students from private schools passed in regular examinations results.

The SLC results are only one indicator of deeper challenges that students in the public school system face. A 2011 research by British educationist Richard Thompson showed that 10 percent of students --even at grade four--do not know the Nepali alphabets.

Another recent report by Education Review Office demonstrated that an average 8 graders scores 35 in mathematics and 41 in science. The students from public schools do worse than the national average and girls fare worse than boys.

Reform Efforts

Building on the vision and goals set by Education For All National Plan of Action 2001-2015 and in the light of increased demand for quality education services, Government of Nepal introduced long term School Sector Reform Plan (SSRP) that focused on "raising the quality, efficiency and effectiveness of school education. " The plan that envisioned a five year program from 2009/2010 to 2013/2014 introduced major reform initiatives including the restructuring of school education, improvement in the quality of education and institutionalization of performance accountability. The initial five year plan was estimated to have cost Nepal USD $2.5 billion and the two year extension of the plan will cost additional USD $1.5 billion. Even with such a significant investment by Government of Nepal, the SSRP has failed miserably to meet its learning achievement targets. To illustrate, the SSRP hoped to achieve the 71% SLC pass percentage in 2013/14 but actual graduation rate was only about 44%, with a dismal 28% for public schools. With a very high repetition rate and school drop out rate, the investment on education sector is largely going to waste.

Strengthening Public School is the Key

The public school system now has become a "last resort" option for children and families who simply cannot afford to pay private school's tuition or where private school simply doesn't exist. The families who choose to send their children to public schools are often the poorest. Children in urban public schools, in places like Kathmandu Valley, tend to be either domestic workers themselves or the children of families who work in the low paying manual labor market.

Many families in rural areas do not have the luxury to choose between schools. A few families in these hinterlands who can afford a boarding school still prefer to educate their children in private schools outside of their home villages. When families can't afford to send all their children to private schools, they are likely to send their boys to a private school and a girl to a public school.

In spite of shifting preference towards private schools and despite the news that many public schools are losing students to private schools, the reality is that 84% students in Nepal are enrolled in public schools, with only 16% in private schools . This means about 6 million children's (i.e. 1 in 5 Nepalese) life outcome is directly tied to the quality of public school education.

The strengthening of public school will require understanding of root causes of the challenges involved and efficient allocation of resources.

Low Academic Achievement Leads to Drop Out

In general, it is presumed that poverty and factors related to poverty increase the drop out rate. However, the Nepal Living Standard Survey (2010/2011) showed that most children and young adults said that "poor academic progress" (25% among 6-24 years old) as the main reason for leaving school. Therefore, it is of great importance that Nepal invests greater national resources and energy to ensure better learning outcomes for the children.

But, the learning outcomes are tied to many interrelated factors and thus, require short and long term strategies to address the need of the children and communities that the public school system serves.

Invest in Quality Teachers

In a country where 4 in 10 people are still illiterate, it is important to remember that only two decades ago, the vast majority of Nepal's population was illiterate. In that context, teachers – who were the only educated individuals in the countryside, wielded significant power and authority. As such, teachers have played an important role in transforming Nepal's political and social landscape.

Despite such an important role played by teachers, teaching is not the profession selected by Nepal's best and brightest graduates. As is often the case, Nepalese families encourage students who perform well to choose professions in medicine, engineering, and business. Even among those who become teachers, the best of them choose to teach and live in places like Kathmandu where they can earn a good living teaching at multiple schools and provide private tuition classes. Thus, rural public schools struggle to find quality teachers – particularly in subjects like Math, Science and English – where over 90% students fail in the SLC.

Furthermore, the public education system barely promotes quality results from teachers. There is no effective system of teacher performance evaluation. Teachers who do well do not receive encouragement and recognition. Similarly, the ones who do not produce results are not penalized.

Through the experience of Teach For Nepal, we have come to learn that a dedicated and passionate teacher can make a significant difference in achieving higher learning outcome from the children. Our first group of Teach For Nepal Fellows graduated from their two years of voluntary service recently. During the two years, we have seen as much as 150% average growth in learning outcome of students.

These young volunteers who studied Engineering, Social Work, Public Health, Social Sciences, Journalism and Sciences, on average, scored 73% in the SLC. Some of them had left much higher paying jobs to go to rural areas to teach.

Even after the two years of Fellowship, 40% of the Fellows have decided to teach for one more year and additional 40% will be working at Teach For Nepal and other organizations that work directly to improve the quality of education. Over the last two years, we have seen over 2,000 young graduates apply for about 150 positions. This year alone over 1055 young graduates applied for 60 Fellowship position. This demonstrates that there is a passion and interest among talented young graduates to be part of meaningful initiative that can support the national goal. This is a clear opportunity for Ministry and Department of Education to recruit top talents into the teaching field as well as non-teaching government jobs to strengthen the public education system.

Re-thinking National Policy Priorities

Better infrastructure, more teachers, scholarships to underprivileged and a separate Head Teacher's position mean higher costs for the country. Already, 90% of the projected SSRP extension cost is allocated for recurrent costs.

The core of both the SSRP and SSRP extension plan take input oriented approaches to achieve the outcomes, as evident in key achievement goals like increases in enrollment rates, construction of more classrooms, trainings of teacher etc. There seems to be very little investment in strengthening the process. For example, in Basic & Secondary Education sector, SSRP extension plan states, "43,000 teachers received training in teaching reading skills" is one key result. However, with 97% trained teachers in the classroom and no evidence of increase in learning achievement, how would more training lead to better learning outcome of the students?

Our experience suggests that trainings aren't enough. Teachers require regular support and feedback to improve their classroom impact. Shanghai education system, one of the best performing school system based on PISA results, demonstrates the need to continuously invest and create opportunities for peer learning, expert feedback, and highly accountable system for the teachers.

Furthermore, our public school system is highly inefficient. The government spends just over Rupees 12,000 per student per year. In analyzing the per student cost of a community run school that we have been part of and the cost of Teach For Nepal program, we have come to realize that the per student cost is, in fact, less than Rs. 1000 a month. Even when accounting for the fact that non-government schools tend to have lower teacher's salary, the government system seems not to benefit from economy of scale.

These inefficiencies are seen directly on the resource allocations starting with teacher's salary. In Nepal, public school teachers are paid higher than international norm. Even though the World Bank's "Best Practices" benchmarks recommends the salary be 3.5 times per capita GDP, public school teachers in Nepal can expect to make up to 5.31 times per capita GDP(SSRP Mid-Term Review). Similarly, number of schools and teachers are disproportionally higher for hill region when compared to the Terai. For example 57% primary schools are located in hills for only 43% of population while only 31% schools support over 50% population living in Terai . Furthermore, the student teacher ratio is much higher in Terai regions than in hill ones. While a Secondary School in Terai can have 600 students or higher, many secondary schools in hills have only 200 or even less students. Such disproportion allocation of resources clearly creates unnecessary financial burden on the education system. While the geographic accessibility creates such situations, we also need to look into other ways to educate our children. With declining fertility rates and population shifts towards urban areas, it is likely that most schools in hill regions will have to face serious challenge in maintaining 150- 200 students in the next decade.

One option is to consider developing fully residential schools –as in rural China - for not just the mountain region but hilly region of Nepal as well. Instead of current practice of one or more Secondary Schools at VDC level, where the government has struggled to provide teachers and support for adequate infrastructure, an ilaka level high school (grade 9 – 12), and VDC level Basic School (up to grade 8) and ward level primary school (1-3) with multi grade teaching can create significant economy of scale.

The creation of schools with bigger student population would mean that the resource currently being invested in building infrastructure and supporting teacher salaries can be consolidated into one space. Similarly, government officials such as Resource Persons overburdened with the need to support 25-30 schools would have lot less schools to work with, thus freeing of up their time to invest in supporting teachers in improvement of instructional capacity.

Until recently, education and learning was the sole prerogative of elites. For the first time in Nepal's history, education has reached most of its citizen. This creates a huge opportunity to build a more just and egalitarian society by building and providing the best possible education to all of our children. This will be possible only through strengthening of public school education where the most vulnerable of Nepal's children come to learn and prepare themselves for a better tomorrow.

(Shisir Khanal is a Co-Founder and CEO at Teach For Nepal)

Twitter: @shisir