VIJAYAWADA: After making English mandatory in municipal schools across the state, the education department is now focusing on making all the primary schools in AP English medium schools. The proposal is likely to get implemented from the coming academic year after cabinet gives its approval. Across the state, there are over 39,000 primary schools where thousands of children have taken admissions. However, these schools are only offering education in Telugu medium.
In order to make the students more successful in the future, the officials are planning to introduce English right from the beginning of schooling. Just like the municipal schools, which have been turned into English medium schools, even the primary schools in the state would be made English medium schools.
On the condition of anonymity, a senior official from the school education department said, “Introducing English in primary schools is nothing new. We have thought and discussed this over years back, but fearing about the dropouts we didn’t put it into action. But now, majority of parents are wishing to provide English education to their children and due to lack of options and financial burden they are enrolling their kids in government schools. So, we wanted to make them feel like private schools with better infrastructure and better teaching. Soon, we will discuss this further with Chief minister Chandrababu
Naidu and try to get it implemented by the next academic year.” In the first phase, the officials are planning to implement this in the district and mandal level primary schools. In fact, district and mandal level primary schools constitute over 75 per cent of the primary schools in the state. As on date, 29,470 primary schools are present in the districts and mandals. Soon, department officials are likely to hold a meeting with teachers unions and teachers MLC’s regarding the plan.The teachers who currently teach in
Telugu, would be given few training sessions to make them capable of teaching in English.
However, the students unions in the state are opposing the government’s proposal stating that officials are forcefully rubbing English onto the students without leaving any option for them.
“Earlier, they said that students can opt for Telugu in municipal schools, but they turned all the schools into English medium without any choice. Now, they are trying to do the same with primary schools. This would affect the students and might result in higher dropouts.” said Noor Mohammad, SFI state president.