Failure to fill teacher posts led to poor Class 12 scores in Vellore

When contacted, district Chief Educational Officer (CEO) S Mars told DT Next, “As many as 200 PG teacher posts are lying vacant. This is one of the reasons for the prevailing situation. The performance of individual schools will be evaluated to ascertain other reasons for the failure.”

Reiterating the same point, Tiruvannamalai CEO V Jayakumar said, “Teacher vacancies more than doubled to 252 this year from 102 witnessed last year. This is a major factor which affected the results as there is no substitute for a good teacher.” Sources said the officials plan to appraise their higher authorities in Chennai on the urgent need to fill teacher vacancies in both the districts.

Meanwhile, the teachers sought to pin the blame on intake of students who are “not academically bright”.

According to TN Vocational Teachers’ Federation General Secretary S N Janardhanan, the government schools in Vellore admit students who have failed several times in other classes.

“The private institutions do not admit such pupils. It is difficult to improve them immediately. Hence, we have a situation tailor-made for poor results,” he said, adding that teachers or teaching methodologies cannot be faulted for the below-par scores. He also said it was unfair to compare Vellore with other districts, stating that “Vellore has more than 20,000 students appearing for Class 12 board exams compared to districts like Kanniyakumari where only around 5,000 students appear.”