COIMBATORE: A teacher’s work is never done. Ask primary school teacher C Ramamoorthy from Coimbatore. His work begins with preparing lesson plans over the weekend. By 9 am, he must check the official WhatsApp group for directions from the school education department. At school, he and other teachers spend at least 20 minutes taking attendance and battling dodgy Internet connections to upload it online. Aside from this, he must complete the several administrative tasks thrust upon teachers by the department before getting home and vetting students’ workbooks.
In the last month alone, the teachers in Tamil Nadu government schools conducted a battery of tests for students, health surveys, data entry for government schemes, alumni registration, and more. “We end up completing the lessons quickly without assessing if the children have understood them or not,” he said.
C Amuthavani, a secondary grade teacher at Erode, said the administrative tasks encroach into the time she spends with students. “All students don’t learn the same way and we have to adapt our methods accordingly. But with all the work, I am unable to use remedial teaching methods for slow learners,” she rued.
Her school is also understaffed. With 70 students from classes 1 to 5, it should ideally have three teachers, but it has only her and the headmaster. Aside from the 13,000-odd vacancies at the schools, educationists said underpopulated schools further stretch the department’s resources. According to data from the department, the state has 37,387 government schools. Of them, 11,265 have fewer than 30 students, while 13,594 have a strength of 31 to 100. Only 390 schools have more than 1,000 students.
Officials cite a lack of teachers, poor infrastructure, and proximity of private schools as the major reasons for 67% of government schools having less than 100 students. The department’s adherence to the teacher: student ratios as per the Right to Education Act, results in these schools not having a teacher for every class. Educationists believe it is time for the department to adopt a 1:25 teacher: student ratio.
Su Moorthy, TN coordinator of the Federation for Education Development, said parents believe that the quality of education would be poor if the school doesn’t have a teacher for every class. So, they enroll their wards in private schools. “Till 1997, the teacher: student ratio in TN was 1:20. Now, in primary classes it is 1:30. So, if there are 60 children in classes 1 to 5 at a school, only two teachers (one headmaster and a teacher) will be recruited,” he said. In such an arrangement, the HM manages all the administration work while the teacher handles all the lessons, he explained.
R Selvamani from Kinathukadavu in Coimbatore said, “The school near my home has only one teacher for all five classes, so, I admitted my son to a faraway panchayat union primary school at Kinathukadavu Main. That school has a teacher exclusively for each class.”