Education, Careers & Professional News
Education department plans surprise visits to private schools
Source
Deccan Herald
Date
2005-07-11
Information
The reason for the latest endeavour is to find out whether schools receiving grant-in-aid fulfil the minimum student strength norm stipulated by the government.
The education department is on a fact-finding mission.
The assignment is to ascertain whether the attendance record of students maintained by private schools, particularly those receiving grant-in-aid from the government, are actually bona-fide.
Officers of the Education Department will now have make at least three unannounced surprise visits to private aided and unaided schools coming under their jurisdiction and verify whether the attendance documents reflect the correct student strength in the institutions.
The reason behind Education Departments latest endeavour is to find out whether schools receiving grant-in-aid fulfil the minimum student strength norm stipulated by the government.
The grant-in-aid goes in paying salaries to teachers and it is mandatory according to the staffing pattern under the Karnataka Education Act-1983 that schools maintain a teacher-student ratio of 1:40. In other words, any decrease in the number of students would translate into cut in grants.
There have been instances wherein schools make up for decrease in student strength by filling in their records with dummy students. In fact, there have been instances wherein schools with hardly any students have been receiving grants for years. We will obtain a clear picture of the staffing pattern by conducting the surprise checks. We will no longer have to depend solely on the attendance records provided by the institutions to release grants, sources in the Education Department told Deccan Herald.
Hitherto, inspections were actually an arranged affair. School managements would get intimation well in advance on the visit by the local block education officer. This provided every opportunity for schools to manipulate records or even rope in students from neighbouring schools and show that they were meeting all the requirements, the sources added.
When contacted, Primary and Secondary Education Secretary T M Vijaybhaskar said grant-in-aid, henceforth, would be released based on the reports filed by education officers after their surprise visits.
For the records, as many 285 lower primary, 2,120 higher primary and 2,621 high schools receive grants from the government.