It has been 42 years since the country has got independent but the capital city has surprisingly seen no new government secondary school even though population has multiplied by leaps and bounds in these four decades.
Experts say hundreds of private schools have mushroomed in the capital taking advantage of the sloth in government policy, making the secondary education system in Dhaka almost completely dependent on them.
Apart from a handful, most of the government secondary schools in Dhaka have not been performing well for many years resulting in students and guardians preferring private schools even though the costs are high.
Most of the reputed government secondary schools such as the Government Laboratory High School and the Dhanmondi Government Boys High School were established in the 1960s.
Manik Chandra Dey, joint secretary of the education ministry, told the Dhaka Tribune: “Some schools were nationalised after independence but no full-fledged government secondary school has been established since.”
According to the Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha (Rajuk), Dhaka’s population was 1.2 million in 1971.
According to the latest figures, the population of the capital is at least 15 million now with 400,000 to 500,000 fresh entries every year.
Figures from the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics show that at present there are around 310,308 students in the Dhaka Metropolitan area.
The 24 government secondary schools in the city host just 28,454 students – merely 9.16% of the aggregate figure.
According to the Bangladesh Bureau of Educational Information and Statistics (BANBEIS), at present there are 432 private secondary schools in the city and a total of 281,854 students go to these schools.
Professor Abul Ehsan, director of the Institute of Education and Research of Dhaka University, said: “Good private schools often charge very high. A large number of people in the city cannot bear such high tuition fees. As such, their children are not getting good education. It is creating disparity in the education sector.”
The monthly fee at a government secondary school ranges between Tk8 to Tk20 per month up against the Tk500 to Tk1,000 range in private schools.
While the annual admission fee in public schools is roughly Tk500, private schools often charge Tk10,000 to Tk20,000 for admission every year.
“The city’s population is increasing rapidly. The number of schools should increase with this,” Prof Ehsan said.
One other problem with the public schools is that most of them are located in the older part of the capital.
This has forced the guardians living in the other parts of the city to send their wards to private schools, often substandard ones, because not everyone can afford the high fees that good private schools charge.
Many areas in the capital including Badda, Baridhara, Gulshan, Moghbazar, Malibagh and Uttara do not have any public school.
“It is not difficult for the high income group people to send their children to private schools with high tuition fees. But it is not possible for those belonging to the middle and low income group,” said Mokarram Hossain, a grocery shop owner in Uttara.
“As a result we are forced to send our children to substandard private schools,” he added.
Apart from all these, the competition for getting admitted into some of these government secondary schools is immense, with hundreds of thousands of students competing for just a few hundred seats every year.
Ashraf Ali, a resident of the capital’s Dhanmondhi area, told the Dhaka Tribune that his son had sat for the admission test at the Government Laboratory High School for three years straight and had remained unsuccessful every time.
“I have decided that I will not ask my son to contest in that admission test again,” he said.
He said the government must increase the number of public schools in the city otherwise the children from limited income families would be deprived of quality education just because they could not afford it.
The government, however, in 2010 took initiatives to establish 11 new public schools in the capital but none of them had yet been finished.
These new schools were to be established all around the capital especially in Mirpur, Mohammadpur and Uttara where there were not too many public schools.
Education ministry officials said the main reason for not establishing any new school in the city was shortage of space.
Fahima Khatun, director general of the Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education, told the Dhaka Tribune: “The main problem was the shortage of land. But this government is trying to establish 11 new government secondary schools in the city.”
“Some of those will start operation very soon,” she assured.
