Cheating on numbers

Many public schools across the country have inflated the number of students they have enrolled so that they become entitled to more teacher posts and other facilities funded by the state. This newspaper’s visits to various community-run primary schools uncovered the phenomenon. For instance, a primary school in a far-flung village in Dhankuta district claimed to have 50 students in its official register but it had only 25 students in reality.



And it is not just schools in remote areas that are inflating the student numbers. Even in Kathmandu Valley schools have faked the size of their enrollments. Buddha Primary School at Dalchoki village of Lalitpur district is a case in point. The school administration has 140 students in its register but the school actually has only 25 students.



False reporting by schools on the number of their students is understandable but unforgivable. Under the Per Child Fund (PCF) policy implemented by the government with the support of various donors, the Ministry of Education allocates teacher quota, textbooks, scholarships and other funds to a given school on the basis of the number of its students. This encourages the school management to inflate the student register so that they can claim a proportionate increase in state support. The core idea underlying PCF is good-- it wants to provide more support to schools bringing more students into their classrooms and providing them a primary education. But absence of any monitoring mechanism and lack of basic morality on the part of school managements are raising serious questions about the effectiveness of this approach.



Faking the number of students enrolled in schools will create a lot of distortion in the education sector. The immediate problem will be one of reliable statistics on students at primary level. Without reliable statistics, the country’s educational strategy and planning will be wide of the mark. Take for example the case of Janak Education Materials Center (JEMC), which has been printing textbooks for government schools. JEMC printed over 4.8 million textbooks for primary level students this academic year. But public schools across the country bought only three million of the textbooks, leaving 1.8 million unsold. Officials have attributed the surplus to discrepancy between the number of students registered and the number of students actually attending the primary schools.



The government, especially the Ministry of Education, must work urgently to address the anomaly. When school managements and teachers engage in such gross misconduct we wonder what type of education they are imparting to the students. The ministry should therefore identify such schools and punish those involved in cooking the figures. The ministry should, however, not punish schools as a whole since that will deny state assistance to schools that are already in dire need of such support.

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