‘Students deliberately held back to hide schools’ poor performance’

A large number of students in Classes IX and XI are being deliberately held back each year in Delhi government and MCD schools so that the institutes’ poor performance in terms of drop in pass percentage does not reflect in Class X and XII results, a new survey has found.

During 2013-2014, 17 per cent students did not go to Class 10 from Class 9. This figure is at 45 per cent for 2014-2015, and it stood at 50 per cent for the year 2015-2016.

Similarly, 23 per cent of students were not promoted to Class 12 during 2013-2014, while the figure was 35 per cent in 2014-2015 and 20 per cent in 2015-2016.

The findings are part of Praja Foundation’s ‘First Annual Report on the State of Public School Education in Delhi’ carried out in 1,709 MCD schools and 1,009 government schools.

Nitai Mehta, the foundation’s Founder and Managing Trustee, explained the trend saying: “This may be happening because schools think that if they promote these children to Class 10 and 12 then their own performance percentage will go down. This raises serious doubts about the quality of education being given at these schools.”  There is also a consistent drop in student enrolments in MCD and Delhi government schools as well as a rise in dropout percentage, according to the survey.

Total student enrolments in MCD schools fell by 5 per cent from 8,69,540 in 2013-2014 to 8,18,707 in 2015-2016.

In case of state government schools, student enrolments dropped by 6 per cent from 15,92,813 in 2013-2014 to 14,92,132 in 2015-2016.

Number of students enrolled in Class 1 registered a decline of 27 per cent in five years, recording 1,69,215 in 2010-2011 and 1,23,325 in 2015-2016.

In terms of pass percentage while state government schools recorded a decline of nearly 10 per cent in Class 10 from 99.09 per cent in March 2011 to 89.25 per cent in March 2016, Class 12 saw a marginal improvement by over a per cent from 87.54 per cent in March 2011 to 88.91 per cent in 2016.

Interestingly, the pass percentage for Class 12 in 2016 for state government schools is higher than private schools by over 2 per cent. A survey of 4,572 households conducted to find out why people were not happy with public schools found most felt that sending a child to a state government school or an MCD school would limit avenues for them in future. The other prominent factors were poor quality of education and of teachers.