Some Data on Bangalore Schools

When KLP ran a remedial reading programme in government schools in Bangalore, it collected data on every child in nearly every school in the city.

Much of this data focused on learning levels, so we could evaluate how many children had become better readers after completing the programme. The KLP website will give you all of this in detail.

But the reading programme exercise also revealed a lot about the schools in general.

Here are some of the facts that surfaced:

• Nearly 30% of children in Bangalore are studying in a second language. Most of them study in Kannada medium but speak Urdu, Tamil, or Telugu at home.
• Girls exceed boys in Bangalore's schools by more than 8,000.
• 162 schools have pupil-teacher ratios greater than 50 to 1 (ranging up to 119). 22 of these are single-teacher schools.
• The average teacher in the city has about 15 years of teaching experience.
  

And some graphs:

Pupil-teacher ratio

Over half (53%) of the schools have pupil-teacher ratios between 21 and 40. Nearly a quarter (24%) have PTRs above 40.

Enrolment by gender and class
There are significantly more girls in government schools in Bangalore than there are boys. We might have expected that the gender gap would decrease in higher classes, in Standard VI or VII, since often girls are taken out of school earlier than boys to get married or help at home. In fact, the gender gap actually increases at the higher levels.

Another explanation? When a low-income family in Bangalore has several children, boys and girls, maybe the girls go to government school and the boys go to private school.

Language: Schools and Students
The bar on top shows the language makeup of schools in the city. The majority are Kannada-medium. However, nearly 40% of the children in the city speak languages other than Kannada at home. The bar on the bottom shows the makeup of students in the city. The limited number of Urdu, Tamil, and Telugu medium schools does little to meet this demand.