Justice D Murugesan committee, formed to analyse the reasons for fewer enrolment of government school students in engineering and other professional courses, has recommended the creation of a database on school dropouts.
“Creating a database of school dropouts is crucial. Unless we create a database, we will never know how many students dropped out to become labourers or victims of child marriage,” said Prince Gajendra Babu, an educationist.
It was based on the recommendations of the committee report that the State government introduced the 7.5 per cent horizontal reservation for government school students in admissions to professional courses. The report also wanted the skills of the students to be identified at school-level itself on the basis of their flair and aptitude. Further, it recommended a revision of the school syllabus to meet the requirements of modern technology, and suggested a mechanism to establish permanent training centres for teachers to update them on the proper utilisation of modern education technology and on the subjects they teach.
“In the pandemic period, teaching has no longer been the same. There have been behavioural changes in students, with their patience and attention levels dropping. Add the introduction of digital technology to it, and our government school teachers will need continuous training,” said M Sashidharan, a retired government college teacher.
“If we genuinely intend to give our government school students their due in professional courses, then all these points, which focus on holistic improvement of our schools, need to be followed,” added Sashidharan. The report also wants the government to focus more on improving the quality of schools. “Government systems generally focus on expansion, which too is a must. But, the schemes which aim to improve quality often get ignored at implementation stage albeit finding a prominent mention in the policies,” mentions the report.
An analysis in the report shows that only 12,659 government school students had joined engineering courses during the academic year 2019-20, representing a paltry 5.59 per cent of the available 2,26,385 seats during the year. In 2020-21, the number was 13,082, just 6.14 per cent of a total of 212932 seats available. The percentage of first generation government school students joining engineering courses stood at 2.41 per cent and 3.22 per cent during academic year 2019-2020 and 2020-21 respectively.
