Amid the growing concerns of dropping turnout, poor standards of education, sloppy mid-day meal schemes, absenteeism and ignorance of provisions of Right to Education (RTE) Act, the Human Resource Department (HRD) will install a review and monitoring mechanism to enable course correction if efforts to meet high standards of education go awry.
The two-tier mechanism of monitoring schools on all the parameters will include a committee in all districts and State Review Mission that will sit at the top of the structure. The mission is likely to be headed by the Principal Secretary HRD and review exercise will be conducted after every three months. “We will constitute a team that will visit schools regularly and will offer consultations for improvement. This is a good way to monitor schools and is intended to move towards a noble cause,” said Principal Secretary, HRD, Aradhana Patanaik.
The committees and the commission will comprise members of non-Governmental organisations and HRD officials. Although the monitoring structure is still in nascent stages the department is likely to install the structure by mid of April. The monitoring structure will be prepared with the help of Jharkhand RTE forum which is a union of various stakeholders of education funded by Government. The department has prepared guidelines for an ideal school to guide stakeholders for better schools and schooling of children.
“We will get a copy of provisions and guidelines for SRM and committee on Monday. We will examine the provisions and everything has to be ready in one and a half month. It will monitor everything that a school is supposed to do,” said Convener, Jharkhand RTE forum, AK Singh. The necessity of a monitoring apparatus was felt because of poor state of affairs at most of the schools. Among the primary concerns that fueled the idea of setting up committees and mission included high dropout rates, skewed figures of MDM, absenteeism, poor participation of schoolchildren and defunct School Management Committee (SMC) that is mandatory in all Government aided schools.
Ironically, provisions of RTE also appeared like an alien concept to most of the teachers hence a reason for the shoddy performance and poor infrastructure to some extent. According to a study conducted by Jharkhand RTE forum around 55 per cent teachers are not aware of the provisions of the Act that in some way affects quality of education and infrastructure to a great extent.
Notably, around 42,000 schools in Jharkhand impart education to children through regular and para-teachers yet providing quality education is a challenge because of a plethora of reasons and commitment appears to be the primary cause among countless others. “We continuously think about infrastructure and in the process we forget quality education. There are some people who work with dedication, some work whereas there is a major part of the workforce doesn’t perform and we need to bring these people on track,” said the Principal Secretary.
Among other prominent measures to improve state of affairs in education comprises recruitment of around 35,000 teachers to meet the ideal student to teacher ratio of 30:1 which at present is 46:1.