BENGALURU: On the occasion of National Education Day, education stakeholders demanded that governments immediately provide for additional expenditure, and prioritise expenditure to benefit disadvantaged students, for re-engaging children with education.
Post the pandemic, experts believe there is no dedicated Covid-19 contingency fund that schools can use to maintain Covid protocol like sanitisation and masking, or even to procure resources for students to revise learning, which has been on halt for almost two years.
“The bulk of allocations should reach schools to support enhanced learning. Additional financial allocations must also be allowed to be spent easily, together with appropriate controls and oversight, through untied school grants,” said members of the National Coalition on the Education Emergency (NCEE), a group of individuals, organisations and networks across the country, which have come together to ‘resume and renew’ school education.
Gurumurthy Kashinath from NCEE said that just like the government increased expenditure due to a health emergency to procure vaccines etc, so also there is an ‘education emergency’ but which has received zero funding. For instance, dilapidated, leaky buildings that haven’t been used during the pandemic, need fixing, students need paraphernalia to revise content from previous classes which was forgotten during the pandemic. A contingency fund of at least Rs 50,000 for each school should be set aside, he said.
The coalition sought additional expenditure to broadly focus on sanitation, repair and health measures in schools, better nutrition, communication materials for parents and teachers, instructional plans, additional learning materials (graded readers, puzzles, games etc) for restructured curriculum, assessment resources, teacher support and resources.