At secondary level, 10.2% drop out in Goa; fix it, says Centre

PANAJI: Goa has a high dropout rate of 10.2% at the secondary school level during the academic year 2019-20. The state also has 230 single-teacher government primary schools, despite the overall teacher numbers showing a surplus of 394, Central government officials pointed out at the review meeting for the implementation of samagra shiksha abhiyan (SSA) in Goa.
“The state needs to take adequate measures to reduce the dropout rate and improve the retention rate,” Goa has been told at the meeting.

The state has been asked to carry out a rationalisation, or redeployment of teachers at the primary level, in a manner that teachers in a school are as per the enrolment and there are no schools where a single teacher is struggling with students from Classes I to IV (primary).
The pupil-teacher ratio is skewed in over 30% primary schools at present, the officials have pointed out to Goa. At the secondary school level too, only 44% institutes have teachers for all core subjects.
“Subject-pupil teacher ratio is 62 (pupils per teacher) for mathematics, 49 for science and 100 for social studies. The state should ensure the required number of mathematics and science teachers at the secondary level,” the minutes of the SSA meeting state.
Central education ministry officials also noted that Goa’s programme of identifying and mainstreaming out of school children was also hit by the pandemic.
“Earlier, migrant families of mining workers left for other states to seek employment. During the pandemic, many other migrant families left and that has had an impact as many did not return. It is not that there are students around who are at home and not enrolled in schools,” said a state official.
He said that there are other contributing factors to the dip in enrolment.
“In recent years, Goa’s enrolment has been going down even before the migrant exodus. This shows the effect of minor drops in birth rates. Also, while calculating enrolment ratio, a certain figure of population is considered of students in the school-going age group. But, for various reasons, this figure may already be an over-estimation of the actual population,” said the official.
Nevertheless, Goa’s school enrolment at the upper primary level too has shown a downward movement during 2019-20. GER from Class VI to VIII was 91.8, as compared to 93.8 in 2018-19.
At the primary school level, the enrolment stood at 99.1 as against 100.9 earlier.
“The state also has to provide information about children of migrant labourers affected due to lockdown as a result of Covid-19 pandemic. The state has not identified out-of-school children in the age group of 16 to 19 as suggested by the ministry. This process needs to be completed early,” central government officials remarked about Goa in the SSA review.