New Delhi: The Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting school closures have impacted the enrolment of students at the pre-primary (nursery, KG) and Class 1 level, data released by the Ministry of Education shows. However, the overall dropout rate at primary and secondary levels has come down.
As per the Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE) 2020-21 data released Wednesday evening, the enrolment of students at the pre-primary level and class 1 has gone down by 29.1 lakh and 18.8 lakh respectively in 2020-21 from 2019-20.
“Although the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is cross-cutting, [that] this is particularly noticed in the enrolment of young and vulnerable kids like pre-primary, Class 1 and Children With Special Needs (CWSN) may be attributed to postponement of admissions due to Covid-19,” the report said.
The UDISE report captures comprehensive data relating to school education, including the enrolment numbers, drop-out numbers, and number of teachers, and also monitors infrastructure in schools.
Dropout rate down
While anecdotal evidence points towards students, especially girls, dropping out of school during the pandemic, the report shows that the dropout rate has come down in 2020-21 compared to the previous academic year.
The dropout rate is the percentage of students from a cohort enrolled at a given level in a given school year who are no longer enrolled at any grade in the following school year.
The report shows that the overall dropout rate in 2020-21 at the secondary level (Class 9-10) is 14.6 per cent, down from 16.1 percent in 2019-20. At the primary level, the dropout rate in 2020-21 is 0.8 percent, down from 1.5 percent in 2019-20.
The report also added that during the first year of the pandemic, 2020-21, 39.7 lakh students of government-aided and private schools shifted to government schools.
“The total enrolment in 2020-21 from primary to higher secondary levels of school education was a little over 25.38 crore. Enrolment for boys was 13.17 crore and that of the girls was 12.21 crore. This was an increase by more than 28 lakh over 2019-20,” the report said.
There has been improvement in the Pupil Teacher Ratio (PTR) as well, the report showed. PTR is the ratio of students to teachers in a particular class — so a lower figure is better.
In 2020-21, the PTR at primary level was 26, for upper primary it was 19, 18 for the secondary level and 26 for higher secondary. This is an improvement from the PTR for 2018-19 at the primary (28 in 2018-19), upper primary (20), secondary (21) and higher secondary (30) levels.
(Edited by Rohan Manoj)
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