More enrollment in government schools than private in 2020-21
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New Delhi: The student enrollment in private schools dipped while a proportionate increase was noted in government schools in 2020-21 because of the pandemic induced financial crisis, Th Indian Express reported, citing district-level government data released on Wednesday.
The Unified District Information System for Education plus (UDISE+) data suggested that the mentioned rise and fall were mostly in pre-primary, primary (I-V) and upper classes (VI-VIII).
Regarding private schools, pre-primary and primary classes recorded a drop of 22.28 lakh and 11.6 lakh of students, respectively. But government school primary and upper primary received a rise of 18.82 lakh and 9.28 lakh students. Considering all classes, 39.7 lakh students of government-aided or private schools moved to government schools.
As a whole, excluding pre-primary classes, enrollment reached 25.38 crores against the 25.10 crores in 2019-20.
In the case of pre-primary level, 1,35,55,892 students enrolled 2019-20, but declined to 1,06,45,526 in 2020-21. The report attributes the drop in the category because of delay in admission due to pandemic. It stated, "Although the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is cross-cutting, this is particularly noticed in the enrolment of young and vulnerable kids like pre-primary, class 1 and Children With Special Needs (CWSN)."
Further, the report gives statistics of pre-primary level girls enrolled in 2019-20 62.39 lakh but dropped to 49.42 lakh.
However, the UDISE report the pre-primary figures in it do not include the enrollment in the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) system run by the Ministry of Women and Child Welfare through the Anganwadi Centers and stand-alone pre-primary education institutions run by different kindergartens.
The report said, "At all the levels above primary, i.e., in upper primary, secondary and higher secondary, school enrolment has increased, showing an improvement in the ability of the system to retain more and more children in the system of school education over time." It showed that the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) has improved across the levels. GER is defined as the number of students enrolled in a given level of education against the total official school-age population corresponding to the same level of education.