Lack of teachers sends State to 27th position in PGI

CHENNAI: The new admissions might have increased in government schools in Tamil Nadu, especially this academic year. But the paucity of teachers at the elementary school level and the delay in filling up vacant posts have affected the Performance Grading Index (PGI) of the State in recent times.

Tamil Nadu’s PGI, which the Ministry of Education released, was pushed to 22nd place in 2019-2020 and the grading further plumped to 27th position in 2020-2021.

A senior official from the School Education Department said that the slide down in PGI was due to the non-appointment of adequate teachers from 2013-2014.

“In this academic year, the vacancy position at the elementary school was 4,863,” he said. “Only one teacher in 3,800 elementary schools was handling students studying from classes 1 to 5.”

The official said most schools, which were handled by one teacher, were situated in districts such as Dharmapuri, Krishnagiri, Salem, Tiruvannamalai, Vellore, Ranipet, Tirupattur, Cuddalore and Villupuram.

Claiming that over 2.8 lakh additional admissions were reported this year at government elementary schools across the State, he added: “Due to new admissions, student-teacher ratio has increased to 1:40. But to meet this demand, we need around 4,500 new teachers apart from the existing vacancy of about 5,000. Over 9,000 teachers are required immediately.”

It may be noted that the State government decided to launch ‘Yennum Yezhuthum’ to improve basic literacy and numeracy among children in classes 1 to 3 to fill the learning gap due to lockdown.

The official pointed out, “It’d be a big task for the authorities to recruit required teachers before the introduction of the scheme. But if it does, they’ll be trained for the programme. If the scheme is implemented successfully, authorities were hoping that it’d push up the State’s PGI to the 10th spot.”