Nearly 90% of students don't access online, TV education in Patna, Muzaffarpur: Study

NEW DELHI: An overwhelming majority of children don’t access online, TV education, the Centre for Budget and Policy Studies (CBPS) survey finds. The CBPS has been implementing an action-research project titled the Bihar Mentorship Project (BMP) in ten selected schools in Patna and Muzaffarpur.

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It has been working in collaboration with the Government of Bihar in nine government and one NGO-run schools for the past two years. According to the surveys conducted with children, parents, teachers, the critical findings that emerged were:

• Almost 90% don’t access online/TV education. Therefore, the reach of online education is limited and more so for children from marginalised communities.
• Children are engaged in greater chores, care work, labour which disproportionately increased during the time of school closure and in situations of emergencies.
• Reaching children, especially those from marginalised communities, when schools close due to emergencies becomes difficult and is almost impossible without apt preparedness.
• Teachers have had no systematic training in dealing with emergency situations where schools are closed and children are confined to their homes.
• Teachers are making efforts, but need additional support and training.
• Teachers are not always equipped to work with children from vulnerable communities, and therefore, capacity building in terms of engaging with marginalised children in emergency situations is necessary.

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During the Covid-19 pandemic period, the Centre for Budget and Policy Studies developed learning materials in the form of letters that children could get when the schools were closed and initiated community-based learning sessions when the lockdown was lifted.

“Emergency response requires a systemic preparedness at the level of the school, children, communities and at the larger system level. This means that building resilient school systems to deal with emergency situations is the most critical action point in the entire agenda of ‘build back better’ as advocated by all actors during and post-pandemic,” it said. The main features of the toolkit are:

• Going beyond emergency of one kind – contextualised and comprehensive understanding of emergencies and related responses
• Focused on marginalised communities, who bear the brunt of most emergencies
• Flexible design and approach – the toolkit can be used as a self-learning material or for training programmes for a variety of actors including teachers, teacher trainers, policy makers, civil society, to name a few
• Demonstrates successful interventions conducted during the Covid-19 emergency and provides guidelines for duplicity and scaling.