Way forward for Punjab school education

AFTER India became independent in 1947, there was momentum to build a new education system. A large number of government schools were established, and many private schools run by educational societies were brought into the aided school system, where the government provided salaries for teachers and prompted the managements to have their teachers obtain the required qualifications. State education boards were set up to organise the school curriculum and examination with universities focussing only on higher education. From 823 high schools in the entire undivided British Punjab, we now have about 8000 high schools in Indian Punjab alone.Education for all and a uniform integral education for all was the motto. In each state, new textbooks were written in vernacular languages and local pedagogical methods were developed. Clear goals were set, of having a primary school in every village, a middle school in the radius of 3 km, and a high school within the radius of 5 km. With the new school boards coming up, a full-fledged infrastructure for education developed in Punjab under the Punjab School Education Board (PSEB). A large number of people obtained education through this public system, who later did very well in all spheres of public life and many of them came from humble, rural backgrounds.As the momentum of the freedom movement lost steam, one saw a reversal. Several transformations occurred slowly and subtly in the 1980s and more actively in the 1990s. New private schools with commercial interests mushroomed everywhere and they preferred affiliation with CBSE and ICSE instead of PSEB. Slowly, one saw that teachers in government schools were reducing in number. The government schools were considered not so good, and people who could afford it were sending their children to private schools. Education thus became a commodity and one had to buy it by paying fees and the quality of education you got was connected with the fees you could afford.In the 1960s, negotiations between a powerful Punjab Teachers' Union and then Chief Minister Pratap Singh Kairon tied teachers' promotions and increments directly to their students' board examination performance. This institutionalised a culture of teacher-led cheating that has grown from an anomaly into the norm — now the state school system's greatest challenge. Consequently, PSEB results and rankings derived from them are spurious, masking severe learning deficits where Class 5 students struggle to read and write, and Class 10 graduates cannot perform basic arithmetic. Over two decades of engaging with three successive state governments and their top education officials, I have seen no administrative will to curb mass copying. This malpractice is sustained by the department itself; from teachers and district education officers to PSEB officials and political leadership, the issue is an open secret nobody wants to address. Halting it would dismantle the state's inflated rankings. Meanwhile, CBSE and ICSE schools remain largely free of such widespread malpractice, yielding better outcomes and driving a steady shift from PSEB. Crucially, this system has eroded the teacher's stature as an ethical mentor. When educators facilitate cheating in board exams, their moral authority and credibility in the classroom collapse. As private CBSE and ICSE schools flourish across Punjab, native language instruction has been marginalised. Students often achieve technical proficiency but lack cultural grounding, emerging detached from their linguistic roots.Expanding senior secondary schools without adequate hiring has created fragmented, understaffed institutions. A village school offering science, arts, and commerce often relies on a lone physics or English lecturer, while neighbouring schools lack basic faculty. Worse, the chronic diversion of teachers to non-academic government duties keeps them away from classrooms for months, undermining public education.It is worth remembering that 11th and 12th classes used to constitute the intermediate level, which was taught in colleges. When these classes were brought into schools, the idea was that a cadre of teachers would be created and that schools would have good teachers, laboratories and the infrastructure needed to support 11th- and 12th-grade teaching. But that has not happened. There is therefore a very important need for consolidation. In a given region of 10 km radius, one school could become a commerce magnet if its commerce programme is strong. Another nearby school could become a science magnet, with physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology lecturers and the facilities needed to run the science stream in 11th and 12th. Another could become an arts magnet, and so on. This would allow us to restructure the system without downgrading any school, by allowing particular groups to flourish in one school or another. Skilling at school level at the 11th and 12th levels is very important. Have we successfully created skilled individuals who can in real terms work on their own after their 12th?The primary school directorate was separated in the late 1970s and therefore high and senior secondary schools in the vicinity have no control or connection with the primary schools. There is no local mechanism for ensuring the quality of education in primary schools. When I have gone to high schools and tried to talk about science to teachers, the most important response is that students coming to them from primary schools are quite ill-prepared and the situation is quite hopeless.In recent times, children of poor people, particularly from Dalit communities, are the ones who attend government schools. Teachers now come from mixed backgrounds because of reservation policies, but most still come from affluent, higher-caste backgrounds. There is a clear cultural divide between the economic, family and caste backgrounds of students and those of their teachers. The dominant communities do not send their children to government schools, therefore they do not care as to what is happening in the village senior secondary schools.Punjab's public school education system has enormous potential to transform the educational landscape of the state. However, this can happen only if the following is implemented:Eliminate mass copying and restore examination integrity: Dismantle the systemic tolerance for unfair means in PSEB examinations and decouple teachers' appraisals, promotions, and increments from raw board pass percentages.Re-establish PSEB as the primary state board: Enforce the original mandate of CBSE and ICSE by restricting their affiliations strictly to institutions serving children of parents in transferable Central services, making a revitalized PSEB the universal benchmark across Punjab.Develop cluster-based magnet schools for 10+2: Consolidate higher-secondary streams across 5-10 km regional clusters, transforming individual schools into fully staffed, well-equipped specialist hubs (e.g., science, commerce, humanities) rather than spreading faculty too thin across sub-optimal institutions.Reintegrate primary and secondary school governance: Bridge the administrative divide created in the 1970s by reconnecting primary schools with local secondary institutions to ensure foundational literacy, numeracy, and continuous pedagogical accountability.Protect instructional time: Strictly prohibit the long-term deployment of teachers for non-academic administrative duties, such as census, surveys, and electoral roll revisions, to ensure uninterrupted classroom instruction.Rebuild local community accountability: Institutionalize participatory oversight through active school management committees (SMCs) and local civic bodies, bridging the socioeconomic divide between teachers, village communities, and students.Modernise pedagogy and deliver authentic vocational skilling: Update classroom tools to match the contemporary technological landscape and introduce rigorous, industry-aligned skill training at the 10+2 level that prepares students for immediate employment or self-reliance.While the above is doable, I don't see it happening in real-time. On the one hand the NEP2020 does not address the real issues faced by school education in India, and on the other hand, the state government is focusing on ranking and on cosmetic changes, demonstrating a clear lack of political will..

Way forward for Punjab school education

Even as NEP 2020 does not address the real issues faced by schools, the state govt is focussing on ranking and on cosmetic changes

Arvind

Way forward for Punjab school education

Even as NEP 2020 does not address the real issues faced by schools, the state govt is focussing on ranking and on cosmetic changes

Arvind

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