It augurs well that the government plans to take up a massive US$16-billion programme to improve the quality of secondary education and for that matter overhaul the secondary education sector. The plan gives us a message of hope that the education sector will begin to recover from the desperately hopeless mess it is currently in. The five-year programme will be financed by the national government, the World Bank (WB) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). In addition, UNESCO, UNICEF and the British Council will provide technical assistance to that end.
The entire secondary education sector will be revamped under this mega project, according to a report published recently in an English Daily. The education sector has been in troubled waters for the last few years. The huge percentage of success in different examinations has apparently created euphoria about development in the education sector. But the quality or standard has deteriorated to such a level that a massive reform was felt necessary in order to retrieve the present education system from collapse.
There has been a debate over the years on the quality of secondary education. The experts diagnosed various problems which worked as impediments to acquiring knowledge and skills that the economy needs. In this highly competitive world education is vitally important for socio-economic development. It is imperative to give special focus on raising the standard and quality of education for the sake of development of human resources needed to push the country forward. We have seen in the past many projects becoming lame duck for a lot of problems. Many projects went haywire in the past because of corruption and lack of direction.
We hope that this major project will be successfully implemented and bring about the desired result by making our youths capable of facing off complex problems and challenges. The reform areas in our education sector should include inadequate number of schools, heavy school curriculum, complex textbooks, outdated teaching methods and poor teaching-learning approaches, drop-outs, teacher shortage in the form of low teacher-student ratio and poor infrastructural facilities. A government survey done last year showed that 50 per cent of the eighth grade learners did not have expected level of competence in English and 46 per cent of them lacked proficiency in mathematics.
Steps must be taken to enhance the productivity of the secondary education by developing the cognitive and technical skills and knowledge of the students so that they can fare well in job market. The curriculum and textbooks should be revised and up-dated and a pre-vocational and vocational curriculum should be introduced to impart skills demanded in national and international job markets. Besides, teachers' quality should be strengthened and enhanced through pre-service as well as in-service training. And above all the gender and other sorts of disparity in education must be eliminated fast. It brooks no further delay.
A thrust on quality education is the need of the hour for national development. It goes without saying that all is not well in the education sector. Despite past progress, the quantity and quality of education and training remain a substantial policy challenge. According to BANBIES, the dropout rate for primary education was 21.4 per cent; net enrolment in secondary education was only 50.2 per cent; and less than 50 per cent of secondary school students completed the full 5-year cycle from 6th to 10th grade. Enrolment at the tertiary level is estimated at a mere 12 per cent. The gender gap in tertiary education is large with female students accounting for only 30 per cent of the total enrolment.
The issue of quality is pervasive at all levels of education and reflected in several dimensions of education inputs including high student-teacher ratios; inadequacy of teacher skills; shortage of certified teachers, and inadequacy of physical facilities relating to class rooms, toilet facilities especially for girls, and laboratories and computers. There are also concerns about the equity of educational spending. For example, from an equity point of view, the gross enrolment rate (GER) for the poor at the secondary level is only 45 per cent, which is significantly lower than 76 per cent of the non-poor. In the area of non-formal education (NFE), some good progress has been made in increasing adult literacy and narrowing the gender gap.
However, sticking to a conventional literacy approach ignoring the need for functional literacy skills as a first step for lifelong learning and not adopting a strategy along this line impedes the effectiveness and popularity of literacy programmes together with a short fall in the job market. The 7th Five-Year Plan (FYP) is an important opportunity to articulate goals and objectives for education and training policy in the light of Education Policy (2010), National Skills Development Policy (2011), aspirations for securing UMIC status (2030) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), education goals and targets (2030).
The challenge of moving forward would be to refine, elaborate, and ensure consistency and alignment with stated and identified national priorities; especially giving adequate attention to education issues that has not been addressed adequately so far. Public spending on education at around 2.0 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is very low and inconsistent with the government's targets for the sector. This level of spending is among the lowest globally and must be reverted soon. Within a medium-term time frame - five years or so - the proportion of GDP for public education budget should be raised to at least 5.0 per cent while it is 25 percent in some developed countries. Education budget planning needs to be formulated on the basis of and guided by the objective of attaining the 7th FYP targets and laying the ground for achieving the targets on education of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Therefore, the issue that now stands out is to implement the mega project in the education sector so that the country can rapidly march forward to prosperity.
Prof. Sarwar Md. Saifullah Khaled is a retired Professor of Economics, BCS General Education Cadre.
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