HYDERABAD: At a time when the Telangana government is planning to introduce English medium education in all government schools from the next academic year, the quality of teachers still remains the biggest concern. Recent data released by the District Information System for Education (DISE) stated that only 3.74 percent of the teachers in elementary schools in Telangana have received formal teacher training and are qualified to teach.
Out of more than 83,300 elementary school teachers in the state, only 3,300 of them are formally trained, the DISE report says. When compared to Telangana, neighbouring Andhra Pradesh stands in far better position with around 9.40 percentage of formally trained teachers. Other South Indian states like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka are way ahead of the Telugu states with 21.6 and 19.57 percent of trained teachers respectively.
This is the similar situation with secondary school teachers as well. The state government in June announced that it would provide special training to the teachers on newly introduced Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE). However, the training programme is yet to be designed. The officials at the State Council of Education Research and Training (SCERT) said, module for new training programme was supposed to be designed by August. But the work is yet to begin.
To fill the vacant teaching posts in schools, the state government has recently appointed around 7,00 vidya volunteers who also lack any formal teacher training. Adding to that, majority of the elementary schools don’t have headmasters. Several regular posts in more than 500 schools are still vacant.
If this was not enough, Telangana also gives one the lowest grants for teachers learning material. A recent report titled ‘Elementary Education in India’ by the Union ministry of human resource development said, the percentage of grants for learning material in annual budget is merely 1.56 percentage of the total budget allocated to school education.
When compared to other states, the number of schools that receive developmental grants is also lower in Telangana. Only 20.77 percentage of schools in the state have received developmental grants, while it is 38.53 percentage in AP, 51.74 percentage in Kerala, 57.57 percentage in Tamil Nadu and 45.20 percentage in Karnataka.