Mumbai’s municipal schools need ideas beyond national education boards to stop decline
The BMC has been desperately trying to stop the flight of students from its schools. However, cosmetic efforts to increase enrolments won’t work. The solution is to monitor and improve education outcomes
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is thinking of introducing Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE) and Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) syllabuses in its schools, which currently follow the Maharashtra education board curriculum.
Last week, the BMC’s education committee, which has jurisdiction over the municipal schools, proposed to get affiliations from the two national education boards for one school each.
Enrolments at BMC schools have been falling though these institutions charge no fees and also provide free meals and study materials. The number of new students registering for Class 1 at municipal schools fell from 63,392 in 2008 to 30,075 in 2017, according to data from Praja Foundation, a group that has been tracking Mumbai’s municipal schools.
The decline in annual enrolments and the movement of students to private schools has caused the total number of students in municipal schools to fall from 4,04,251 in 2008-09 to 3,11,663 in 2017-18. And while the annual dropout rate at the schools have declined from 12 per 100 in 2013-14 to 5 per 100 in 2017-18, the number of children who left municipal schools in 2017-18 – mostly to join a private institution – was 15,978.
During this period, over 200 municipal schools either closed down or were merged with other institutions because there were not enough students. If current trends continue, the number of students at these schools will drop below 1,50,000 in 2022-23.
Some of the decline in municipal schools can be attributed to changes in Mumbai’s birth rate, with a general decline in the number of children in the school-going age. The number of children in schools declined from 8,98,953 in 2013-14 to 7,96,814 in 2017-18 but data shows that enrolment in private schools has increased during the same period. Unified District Information on School Education (UDISE) data shows that enrolments in private unaided schools in Mumbai increased from 3,14,931 in 2013-14 to 3,26,507 in 2017-18.
The BMC has been desperately trying to stop the flight of students from its schools. Last year, the BMC planned to affiliate 25 of its schools to the new Maharashtra International Education Board (MIEB) started by the state government. The plans were cancelled after high affiliation fees and teacher training costs. The municipal corporation recently started a campaign on social media forum for convince parents to send children to their schools. It has spent nearly ₹100 crore to repair and reconstruct its schools. Schools have been ‘beautified’.
Funds are not in short supply: the BMC spent ₹51,000 annually on each student in 2017-18 and average spending is expected to increase to ₹65,290 in the current academic year.
But these cosmetic efforts to increase enrolments will not work. The solution, as groups like Praja Foundation have been advocating, is to monitor and improve education outcomes.
Municipal schools have trained and well-paid teachers, but this has not earned the confidence of parents. A survey revealed that 94% of parents said that they would want to shift their children to private schools.
Even poor parents do not want free education for their children and are ready to pay private institutions that offer better learning outcomes. Municipal officials understand this. A few months ago, the municipal education officer was on record saying they are trying hard to improve the quality of education at its schools. “Once that happens, everything else is secondary,” he was quoted as saying.
Even as municipal schools are being forced to close down because of low enrolment, the BMC, which is in charge of primary school education in the city, earlier this year declared over 200 private schools, with over 12,000 students, illegal because these institutions were being run in unsafe buildings or had been crowding too many students into classrooms.
The message from the episode is clear: parents trust private schools — even illegal ones — to deliver better education outcomes than municipal schools. Unless BMC wakes up to this fact and improves the quality of education at its schools, superficial interventions like seeking affiliation with national boards will not stop the downslide in enrolments.