E-Paper
HP parents prefer private schools for kids’ pre-primary edu
Six per cent of all six-year children have not enrolled anywhere.
Parents in Himachal Pradesh prefer to send their wards to private schools instead of anganwadi and government schools for pre-primary education, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER rural early years) has revealed.
As per the report released early this month, as many as 70% of children were enrolled in lower kindergarten (LKG) or upper kindergarten (UKG) in private schools.
Comparatively, only 9.2% were enrolled in Anganwadis and 18.6% in government schools. The Himachal Pradesh government introduced pre-primary classes in state-run schools in 2018.
Similarly, 71.5% of Class 1 students were enrolled in a government school against 28.6% in government schools. In Class II, 71.9% of students are enrolled in private schools and 28.1% in government schools.
The rate is 31.4% against 68.7% in Class III. The ASER 2019 survey was conducted in 60 villages of Kangra district covering 1076 households and 1334 children in the age group of 4-8 years.
In pre-primary classes, of all 4-year-olds, 0.7% of children have not enrolled anywhere, 97.5% were in pre-primary classes and 1.8% in Class 1 or above.
Six per cent of all six-year children have not enrolled anywhere.
During the survey children performed were given a variety of cognitive, early language and numeracy tasks and activities to assess their social and emotional development was also undertaken.
The study revealed that among children in Class I, as many 13.9% children cannot even read letters; 34.1% can read letters but not words or higher; 21.1% can read words but not a Standard I level text or higher. Only and 30.9% can read a Standard I level text or more.
Similarly, 8.2% of children cannot even recognize numbers up to 9. As many as 18.5% of children can recognize numbers up to 9 but cannot recognize numbers up to 99, and 73.4% can recognize numbers up to 99.
In the same age group,
36.8% could do a single-digit oral word addition, 28.4% could do a single-digit oral subtraction and 62.7% single-digit relative comparison task. Only 39.1% could identify all the four emotions — happiness, sadness, anger
and fear
