IUBAT Roundtable on Quality of Primary Schools

John Richards, IUBAT overseas faculty member, led a roundtable on the problems of school quality in Bangladesh. The roundtable was organized to release the latest monograph of the IUBAT Centre for Policy Research. The monograph title is “What Parents Think of their Children’s Schools”.

21 May 2007

News Release

John Richards, IUBAT overseas faculty member, led a roundtable on the problems of school quality in Bangladesh. The roundtable was organized to release the latest monograph of the IUBAT Centre for Policy Research. The monograph title is “What Parents Think of their Children’s Schools”.

Vice-Chancellor and Founder, Dr. M. Alimullah Miyan presided.

While the number of children attending school in Bangladesh has increased dramatically since 1990, there are serious problems of school quality, Professor Richards said.

Since 1990, the number of primary school students has risen by 50 percent. The number of students in secondary school has risen by nearly threefold. Another accomplishment is that the enrolment rate among girls is now equal to that for boys in both primary (grades 1 – 5) and secondary (grades 6 – 10).

Professor Richards reported the results of a survey conducted by IUBAT students and Sandra Nikolic, a graduate student from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. The survey among 350 parents in Uttara illustrated some of the problems in school quality:

Among parents in both Government and BRAC nonformal schools, over half were concerned with the quality of teachers. These concerns were far less among parents whose children attended private schools or madrasas.
Poor school management was a perceived problem among over half the parents whose children attend Government schools. School management is not perceived as a problem among parents with children in nonformal or private schools, or madrasas.

While nearly 90 percent of children now enroll in the first year of the primary cycle, only about three quarters graduate. Among those who complete the cycle, CAMPE, a major Bangladesh NGO that monitors school performance, has reported that only two thirds achieve effective literacy. This implies that less than half the generation of children reaching age 11 are effectively literate.

About five of six children who complete the primary cycle begin secondary school. But here the problem of dropouts is very severe. Only one boy in five who begins grade six completes the cycle to obtain his Secondary School Certificate (SSC). Only one girl in seven completes the cycle.
There are many reasons for dropping out:
Students require private tutoring, which the poor cannot afford, to maintain adequate grades.
Many students are “first generation” learners, and their parents cannot help them with their studies.
Facilities in many schools are inadequate.

Education should be a very high priority for the new caretaker government. Building a high quality education system will require a generation. But the government can launch positive reforms. It can increase education as a share of the national budget. It can develop a shared core curriculum for all school streams, and use tests in core subjects. It can begin to decentralize the overly centralized Bangladesh government school system.

The well attended roundtable generated considerable interest on the issues of quality improvement through better schools and teachers. Better management of schools through involvement of local community came out to be a key determinant to educational quality improvement.

(All CPR monographs are available free on line at http://www.iubat.edu/cpr)