Near about 2.5 to 2.7 lakh students in the Gujarat are expected to be detained in the same class from this academic year after Gujarat government last month decided to implement an amendment of the Right to Education Act that was passed by Parliament in January.
One of the amendments to the RTE Act was the scrapping of the no-detention policy and it gives states the right to take a call on whether to detain weak students or not. Citing this, State Education Minister Bhupendrasinh Chudasama announced in his Budget speech last month that Gujarat would detain students from class 5 and class 8 from the current academic year if they failed their examinations.
In January after Parliament passed the amendment, Chudasama said the Gujarat government needed it and had been demanding it for long and it would be implemented in the March-April 2020 annual examinations. He said that the no-detention policy had adversely affected learning levels of children in Gujarat and directly impacted the state education board results too. “After this amendment and remedial programmes for detained students, the (board exam) results will be improved,” he had said at the time.
Now after the amendment in RTE Act near about 30 to 33 percent of the total number of students in classes 5 and 8 could be detained.
A four year report by the state education department of Gujarat based on the overall pass percentage of Class 10 students under the Gujarat Secondary and Higher Secondary Education Board (GSHSEB) reveals that the numbers would go up in the second and third year.
“These 2.5 lakh students who are given class back to Class 8 again will add to the fresh 8 lakh students in the first year of scrapping of no-detention policy,” a senior education official said, explaining the numbers estimated for four years.“From this 10-10.5 lakh students, around 3.25-3.5 lakh students will be held back in the second year. Similarly, in the third year, among those detained in both classes, a few are expected to drop out, while a few are expected to clear (be promoted to the next class). Thus, upto the fourth year this will ease out making the number of detained students highest in the third year.”
As Minister Chudasma had said, the decision to move to detain weak students in lower classes was taken to improve the pass percentage of students by the time they are in class 10 taking the board examinations. The pass percentage in class 10 has been between 63 and 67 per cent in the past five years.
Mission Vidya campaign aimed at improving reading, writing and mathematics skills of students from Class 6 to Class 8 but the expected outcome seems bleak.
The campaign results disclose that only 43 per cent improvement in writing while for the reading it was 48 per cent.
The Gujarat government has launched the Mission Vidya campaign during the previous academic session aiming to raise the learning levels of students who were in Class 6,7 and 8 and scored low in the latest Gunotsav VIII evaluation.