Teacher, pupil ratio to be streamlined

RANCHI: The state school education and literacy department has now begun step wise inquiry from all districts to reshuffle subject specific teachers in these schools after getting complaints from post graduate teachers, who were appointed in plus-two schools of having no students to teach.

Recently, Pushpa Prasad, a commerce teacher at S S Plus II High School of Joram, Simdega, wrote to the department and shared her problems of how the place where she is posted has no enrolment of students in her section. Officials in the department concede that such complaints are coming from other places as well, prompting them to launch the drive.

Talking to TOI, education secretary A P Singh, said: “It has been brought to the notice of the department that PGT teachers posted in many schools do not have students to teach. In Ranchi, the Plus II school in Mesra has the same issue. Since the larger chunk of over 600 Plus II schools in the state opened after 2015, the enrolment number in each subject is not very high, rendering many PGT teacher appointments pointless while students in many other schools continue without subject teachers.”

While the standard requisition is for 11 subject teachers in each Plus II schools, the department has found that in some schools, teachers have no students to teach while the situation is reverse in others, with large number of students and no teachers across the state.

To address the problem, Singh has written to director of secondary education to prepare a list of subject teachers posted in schools and the requisitioned posts in each of these schools so that resources are put into optimum use.

“When we started the Plus II level options in state run schools, we modelled the same on CBSE schools like Kendriya Vidyalayas. But these schools have been generally location specific with every school having over 500 students,” Singh said.

“Since that kind of enrolment is not possible in state run schools, we have planned on making a database of teacher need and surplus across the state and reshuffling the teachers accordingly,” he added.

The department will be taking insights like class size, number of students and teachers, teaching hours and the available infrastructure of CBSE schools into account for the process.

Additionally, a separate record of students enrolled in tribal languages and the availability of such teachers will be prepared, so that each school having students of these languages enrolled can have at least one subject teacher dedicated to them.

“We have resources at disposal but they are scattered and unused, causing gaps. From the next session, students across Plus Two schools will have the required number of subject teachers,” Singh said.