Implication of primary school report on RTE implementation

The recent report from Pratham on primary schools across five states has some implications on the implementation of RTE across the country.

• Currently the government measures enrollment of children in schools.  This measure now proves to be incomplete and one needs to measure attendance of students.
• It also will be necessary to be able to make dip stick checks more than once a year for the same set of children. Though this will perhaps double the cost is the entire sample size is surveyed again, it might help get better data.
• Recruitment mechanism for teachers needs to be different than what is used currently. Teacher's ability to teach and connect with the children needs to have more weightage. Even training provided to the teachers needs to focus on improving teachers' ability to teach.
• The classrooms clearly need to be invested into and be made child-friendly.
• The Pratham report found that children and multiple grades are put together in the same classroom. Though this is clearly undesirable, this area might be more difficult to fix because it directly has an impact on finances available for improvement and growth of infrastructure.
• Libraries need to increase in size, more private libraries need to get roped into the system to get students to read books which are away from their regular curriculum.