THIRUVANANTHAPURAM:The government and aided schools in the state should have a minimum strength of 15 students in a class, the government has decided. The Directorate of Public Instruction (DPI) has issued a circular fixing the minimum strength of students, in a class of lower primary, upper primary and high school level, in government and aided schools as 15. The decision was taken on account of the drastic drop in the number of students who get admitted to the schools in government and aided sectors.
According to DPI’s order, if a school has a minimum strength of 15 students in each class, it will be deemed as a school with a sufficient number of students. Earlier, the minimum strength was 25 as per the Kerala Education Rules (KER).
To reduce the limit, the government has also decided to amend the guidelines related to the appointment and transfer process of teachers and headmasters in the KER.Sources said that around 49 per cent of schools in the state did not meet the minimum criteria of student strength. This also led to the transfer of teaching staff from the schools which had sufficient staff strength to the schools which had an insufficient number of staff. Besides, the government had to provide remuneration to the teachers on a daily wage basis.
The managers of the schools which follows the minimum criteria can conduct the appointments as per the amended guidelines in the KER. The DPI also ordered school authorities not to term schools without minimum student strength as ‘uneconomic’ schools. The term should be removed from official records. Instead, such schools should be called ‘schools without sufficient student strength’, the order said.
In such schools, Headmasters can be appointed through promotional postings. Fresh appointments to these schools should be on the daily-wages basis.Transfer of teachers to schools with insufficient students would not be permitted. However such transfers are allowed for schools under the same management in the aided school sector.
DPI order
If a school has a minimum strength of 15 students in each class, it will be deemed as a school with a sufficient number of students
The DPI made it clear the order will come into effect from the current academic year