Multiply & Modernise Secondary Schools

The small minority of India’s top-rung legacy boarding and new genre international schools are on a par with the best private schools in the West. But the majority of secondaries are under-developed by global standards

THE GLARING qualitative gap which is evident between post-independence India’s private and government preschools and primaries, is unbridged in secondary education, and arguably exacerbated. As indicated previously, 53 percent of the 230 million children enrolled in primary schools countrywide, especially in government schools don’t complete elementary (class VIII) education — undoubtedly the greatest wastage of human capital in any nation state worldwide. Subsequently, another half of the children who enter secondary education fail to complete high school, with the result that only 51 million were enrolled in senior secondary (class IX-X) and higher secondary (classes XI-XII) education according to HRD ministry statistics (2011).

Again only half this cohort (26.7 million) enters tertiary education, according to data cited by Dr. Laveesh Bhandari, an alum of Boston University and  founder-director  of the Delhi-based Indicus Anlytics, an economics research firm, in a recent compendium titled Getting India Back on Track — An Action Agenda for Reform (Random House, 2014). According to Bhandari, a major infirmity of Indian education is lack of adequate capacity-building in secondary education with only 200,000 intermediate/senior/higher secondary schools operational countrywide and subject to a “poorly designed” regulatory system.

“The issue therefore is more about choice — oversight by the right stakeholders, with the power to replace teachers, a voice in determining course content, the monitoring and enforcement of quality, and regulation of schools — than it is about public versus private. What is most important is that this choice be provided to students and the community (and not the bureaucrats) in all domains of learning — schools, teachers and curriculum,” writes Bhandari.

The plain reality of the 67-year-old self-styled socialist India is that only households which can afford to pay, have the luxury of school choice. At the top of the hierarchy are India’s vintage private British-style primary-secondary boarding schools, some established 200 years ago, where  children of the traditional elites are schooled (tuition fees: Rs.1.5-5 lakh per year), and new genre of day-cum-residential international schools affiliated with offshore examination boards (IBO, CIE, AP) with five-star amenities favoured by the country’s new rich (Rs.5-8 lakh).

Next in the pecking order are unaided (financially independent) mostly day schools which dominate secondary and higher secondary education (estimated number: 80,000; Rs.30,000-100,000), followed by government-aided private schools in which staff salaries are paid by the state government in exchange for government approved syllabuses, certification and tuition fees. Next in the hierarchy are Central, state and local government secondary and higher secondaries (estimated number: 60,000).

Unsurprisingly, Central government schools (Kendriya Vidyalayas, Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas) affiliated with the Delhi-based Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and established mainly to educate the children of top-level transferable bureaucrats, are heavily subsidised and tend to be on a par with the best unaided schools, indicating that the bureaucracy looks after its own interests very well.

The small minority of state and local government promoted secondaries (approx. 20,000 countrywide) affiliated with state examination boards, prescribe minimum standards, poor quality textbooks, and are the happy hunting grounds of state and local politicians and bureaucrats neck deep in teacher recruitment and transfer, and textbooks printing rackets. And last but not least in the complex secondary education hierarchy, are a small number of private unrecognised and under-threat budget schools of which the overwhelming majority are primary institutions.

Although the small minority of India’s top-rung legacy boarding schools and new genre international schools are arguably on a par with the best public (private, exclusive) schools in the UK, US and elsewhere, the majority of the country’s secondaries are under-developed by global standards.

The institutional infirmity of India’s secondary education — rooted in poorly designed and regulated ECCE (early childhood care and education) and primary education systems — was cruelly exposed in 2011 when a batch of secondary students from Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu — top rated states on the NUEPA education index — were selected to write PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), a transnational global competitive examination to assess the science and maths learning outcomes of 15-year-olds. Of the 74 countries which participated, the Indian cohort was ranked 73rd, ahead only of Kyrgyzstan.

The relatively poor employability, workplace productivity and global uncompetitiveness of India’s youth is belatedly causing deep anguish, and has prompted focused attention on the quality of school education and further down the education continuum.

“India has the world’s largest reservoir of young, dynamic and high-potential human resources. The future of our country depends on them. Quality education is the key to make this workforce employable and productive to contribute to national development. However, we cannot deny the fact that the school system is partly to blame for a large number of graduates and engineers remaining unemployed due to lack of requisite skill sets. We urgently need to focus on creating engaging and intellectually stimulating hands-on learning environments in K-12 institutions, to make our children globally competitive,” says Dr. Augustine Pinto founder-chairman of the Ryan International Group of Institutions (RIGI, estb. 1976). Pinto’s views on education reforms are important because RIGI manages 128 wholly-owned co-ed primary-secondary schools with an aggregate enrolment of 250,000 children — the country’s largest owned private sector school chain offering affordable (Rs.10,000-2 lakh per year) education to children of the emerging new middle class  (see box).

Awareness of the critical importance of enabling access to quality secondary and higher secondary education has belatedly dawned upon the hitherto primary education-focused Union government in New Delhi, even if not upon the state governments.

In 2008, the Central government announced its Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA, national secondary learning scheme) under which a model secondary school will be established in all 6,000 administrative blocks countrywide, with 3,500 secondaries to be established by the Centre in educationally backward blocks, and 2,500 in non-backward blocks under public-private partnership agreements. According to RMSA sources, the scheme is going great guns and thus far (March 31, 2014), 9,953 model schools have become operational countrywide.

While these statistics which presage a radical improvement in secondary education are encouraging, there’s a long way to go before qualitatively acceptable secondary education becomes available to the masses as is normative globally. Nevertheless growing awareness that high quality secondary school education is the prerequisite of raising standards of higher education, bodes well for introducing education reforms across the spectrum.