Secondary education critical to breaking inter-generational cycle of poverty, with huge beneficial impacts on health, marriage age, fertility rates, and child rearing practices Media Contact:
In New Delhi: Sudip Mozumder (91-11) 24617241
smozumder@worldbank.org
NEW DELHI, October 6, 2009 ─ India needs to equip the 12 million young people who join its labor force every year with higher levels of education and skills to be able to access better-paying jobs, and to benefit from the demographic dividend, says a new World Bank report. To achieve this, the country will need to reduce the significant bottlenecks in its secondary education system. The Report, Secondary Education in India: Universalizing Opportunity puts forward several suggestions aimed at improving secondary education in India. These include increased investments in additional classrooms and teachers, improved curriculum and textbook development; more effective teacher education and training; introduction of new educational technologies; improved teacher management and accountability systems; and examination reforms that will improve access, quality and equity of secondary education. Today, the challenge for the Government of India (GoI) is to dramatically improve access, equity and quality of secondary education, simultaneously. The GoI’s recently launched centrally sponsored scheme for secondary education – Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) – offers a tremendous opportunity to set up a mass secondary education structure - that is responsive to the country’s socioeconomic needs and capabilities. “Compared to elementary and higher education, secondary education has not received the attention it deserves until now. Yet evidence from around the world suggests secondary education is critical to breaking the inter-generational transmission of poverty – it enables youth to break out of the poverty trap. Fortunately, the government’s new ambitious schemes for secondary education will, over the next ten years, provide young people with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in the 21st century and help India catch up with other countries,” said Sam Carlson, Lead Education Specialist, World Bank. Inequitable access Access to secondary education is today highly inequitable across income groups, gender, social groups, geography and states. According to the report there is a 40 percentage point gap in secondary enrollment rates between students from the highest and lowest expenditure quintiles. In addition, there is a 20 percentage point gap between urban and rural secondary enrollment rates, and a persistent 10 percentage point gap between secondary enrollment rates of boys and girls. Secondary enrollment by state also varies greatly from 22 percent in Bihar to 92 percent in Kerala; and from 4 percent in Jharkhand to 44 percent in Tamil Nadu. In some states such as Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh enrollment of the general population at the secondary level is 80 percent higher than for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes and Muslims. Significant impact on gender, health and nutrition Highlighting the immense social benefits that secondary education can have for girls, the report states that the average age of first time mothers with less than five years of education is 19, which is significantly lower than that of girls with at least 12 years of education, where the average age is around 25 years. This difference has a significant impact on both child mortality and malnourishment. Child mortality for girls who become mothers at 25 is around 30 per 1000 children much lower than the 80 deaths per 1000 children for mothers with less than five years of education. The percentage of malnourished children also dramatically reduces to around 18 percent for mothers with at least 12 years of education as compared to 46 percent for mothers with less than five years of education. Such immense social benefits are critical to breaking intergenerational transmission of poverty, says the report. Crucial for economic development Availability of sufficient skilled human capital is one of the key variables in determining foreign direct investment in both manufacturing and services – a key factor in economic growth. It is here that India lags behind some of its global competitors. The share of the labor force which had completed secondary education in India in 2004 (16 percent) was just half of the percentage of workers in China who had completed secondary education in 1975 (31 percent), thirty years earlier. India’s gross enrollment rate (GER) at the secondary level of 40 percent is far inferior to the GERs of its global competitors in East Asia (average 70 percent) and Latin America (average 82 percent). Even countries such as Vietnam and Bangladesh, which have lower per capita incomes than India, have higher gross enrollment rates. This suggests India has a lot of catching up to do. Projections made in the report suggests an increase in absolute demand for secondary education between 2007-08 and 2017-18 of around 17 million students, with a total enrollment growing from 40 to 57 million students. However, an increasing share of these students will come from rural and lower income quintile groups, who will be less able to afford private unaided secondary education. Key constraints: The report highlights some of the key constraints that limit access to secondary education. These include insufficient and uneven distribution of school infrastructure; lack of trained teachers and inefficient teacher deployment; sub-optimal use of private sector to expand enrollment capacity; and insufficient schooling opportunities. In fact, 27 percent of India’s districts have less than one secondary school for every 1,000 youth aged 15-19 years. Low completion rate of elementary education, which limits the number of students ready for secondary education is a major constraint on the demand side. Currently fewer than 60 percent of children complete grade 8, though this is improving with SSA. Moreover, the average direct cost of secondary education is double that of primary education, which reduces poor households’ ability to pay for secondary education.
Recommendations made by the report:
Options to increase supply of secondary education include: i. Innovative public-private partnership models including reform of the current grant-in-aid system; ii. Public classroom and school construction, especially in rural areas; iii. Training and hiring of more teachers; iv. Introduction of double-shift teaching; v. Expanded use of open learning and new technologies to complement and supplement face-to-face teaching | Options to raise demand for secondary education include: i. Increase the number and quality of grade 8 students; ii. Provision of financial and in-kind assistance for poor and disadvantaged students; iii. Public information campaigns to change attitudes about benefits of schooling and delayed marriage; iv. Investments in curriculum revision, progressive pedagogy, technology and examination reforms. | Options to improve quality of secondary education include: i. Strengthened secondary education teacher training colleges; ii. Peer-based, mentor-led, subject-specific professional development of teachers; iii. Teacher performance standards and increased community monitoring of student learning; iv. Financial incentives and technical assistance for State boards to align both curriculum and examinations to the National Curriculum Framework; v. Improvements in textbook development and distribution; vi. Participation in international assessments of student achievement at the secondary level. |
For more information about the Report and the World Bank’s work in India, please visit: http://www.worldbank.org.in
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