Govt High School at Majaat village. Express photo by Jasbir Malhi
Jaspreet Singh, a Class 10 student at Majaat, failed in his matriculation examination. English was the toughest subject for him. Not only Jaspreet but out of a total of 31 students, 22 have failed in English this year. However, the overall pass percentage of the school was 25.8 which is slightly better than the last year’s percentage of 20.
Jaspreet Singh maintains the students could not study in the last few months. “We did not have regular English lectures after December, so we could not prepare for the exam,” he said.
“I feel the situation did not change a bit. Last year, the Mathematics results were very weak. This year it happened with English. These two are the most important subjects and our school is lagging behind in these two. It is a matter of great worry for us,” said Hakam Singh, a member of the committee looking after the school.
Hakam Singh blamed the teachers for this. He said that despite their best efforts, their school is not delivering good results and their children are suffering. Parwinder Singh, who also failed in English examination, said that their regular English teacher went on leave in December, following which their Social Studies teacher started teaching their class in January. They had to appear in the examination in March.
“Our studies suffered as we were not able to finish the syllabus in the last days. We also tried to take private tuition but since no good teacher was available in our village, so we failed in the examination,” Parwinder said.
The pass percentage in English is only 29.03 per cent which is very less than the overall (73.31) pass percentage of the Punjab School Education Board (PSEB) this year.
“The results are bad. Since there was no regular English teacher in the last months, we could not do anything. The English teacher went on maternity leave and then we had to make some alternative arrangements. Last year we were weak in Mathematics, this year we improved a lot and out of 31 students, 25 (80.64 per cent) students passed the exam,” said Kashmir Kaur, who is holding additional charge of headmistress of the school.
Kashmir Kaur said that the poor attendance of the students was also a reason for the poor results. “Our teachers used to go to convince the parents to send their children to schools. Some teachers also complained that the students were not serious about their studies. The school has not got a regular headmaster for the last two years. There is no peon, no clerk, so the teachers have to do all the work. It is also one of the reasons why the studies suffer and the school got the bad results,” she added.
In Science 25 students passed the exam, in Computer Science 29 students passed this year while 27 students each passed in Hindi and Punjabi.