1,400 more schools come under English umbrella in Karnataka

BENGALURU: The State will embark on a major project to more than double the number of government schools imparting education in English, which is being introduced in Class 1.This year, as many as 1,400 schools have been identified by the primary and secondary education department to start teaching in English. Of these, 1,000 are Kannada schools and 400 are Urdu schools. This is in addition to the 1,000 schools that already exist, and have gained popularity among schoolers. 

The textbooks are bilingual -- they will be printed in English and Urdu/Kannada, a department official said. The order to print the books has already been issued for this year, and admissions have begun in these schools, the official added.The department’s English medium school scheme was a hit the previous year, with more than 30,000 students having enrolled. Several were turned down because of the department’s mandate to enrol not more than 30 students per class. 

The number of students in the 1,400 schools is limited to 30 per classroom. With this, the department will see an additional of 42,000 students in government English medium schools this year. The schools are distributed across 224 constituencies, Principal Secretary, primary and secondary education, G Umashankar told The New Indian Express.Each constituency will have English introduced in four Kannada medium schools run by the government.

This comes at a time when the government is seeing an influx of private school students into government schools, and some of them are those who had enrolled in private schools under the government’s Right To Education scheme.The 1,000 English medium schools started during HD Kumaraswamy’s tenure as CM are stepping into their second year. Books for Class 2 students are already printed, department officials said.