No government school has closed down in Kerala in nine years: Minister

Minister for General Education V. Sivankutty has denied that government schools in Kerala are closing down.

Not a single government school in the State was closed in the past nine years, the Minister said in a Facebook post on Tuesday.

Union government statistics that showed a decline in government schools were baseless and an attempt to discredit the State, Mr. Sivankutty alleged.

Union Minister of State for Education Jayant Chaudhary, in reply to an unstarred question by K. Radhakrishnan, MP, in the Lok Sabha on closure of government schools across the country, had submitted that 205 schools had closed down from 2019-20 to 2023-24 (201 from 2021-22).

Referring to the numbers, Mr. Sivankutty said these were related to multi-grade learning centres (MGLCs), started as part of District Primary Education Programme (DPEP), a Centrally sponsored scheme, in the early 1990s. Once the Right to Education was passed, these could not continue as schools and were gradually phased out. Facilities, including free transport, had been arranged for the MGLC students to shift to nearby schools.

As per the figures presented in the Lok Sabha, there were 5,014 government schools in 2019-20. It rose to 5,020 in 2020-21, fell to 5010 a year later, and further declined to 4,811 in 2022-23 and 4,809 in 2023-24. the data were sourced from UDISE and UDISE+ databases on school education in the country.

‘Not updated data’

Officials say UDISE+ data is directly updated by schools and hence not properly validated by the General Education department. Sampoorna is the State’s official school management portal for everything from student strength to textbooks distribution and scholarships, but the Union government does not use this data. It had been proposed sometime ago that data on the Sampoorna portal along with other parameter details be collected and submitted to the Union government. However, that did not happen. Moreover, the data on UDISE was not up to date, unlike in the State where it is updated on the sixth working day every year. The UDISE data quoted by the Union government was not updated for even the 2024-25 academic year, they point out.

The MGLC were not really considered government schools, they point out.

According to the Sametham portal maintained by the Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education, there are 5,813 government schools in the State.