Identification of factors impacting the preference of parents/guardians for government primary schools: a case study of Bhopal

Abstract

Within the domain of school education, primary education is a special category as it lays the foundation of the skill and knowledge-based development of human being. Government at local and state level is constitutionally obliged to provide education infrastructure. Government has an important role in urban areas as it has wide range socio-economic disparity. Government schools in urban areas are lacking in adequate provision of school infrastructure, effective policies and firm school administration system. The issue today is not the lack of demand, but rather quality of supply. Urban deprived children are not being in government primary schools, not because of the financial or any social problem but due to of shortcomings in schools systems. This thesis aims to identify factors impacting preference of parents/guardians for government primary in Bhopal and analyze the spatial variations of those factors. Bhopal has been selected as study area because here government is spending crores of rupees in primary education but increase in enrollment is seen high in case of private primary schools. So there is need to identify the factors which are affecting the preference of parents and guardians towards sending their children to government primary schools. To understand the preference of parents/ guardians is one of the tricky part. In this study a methodology has been adopted to identify the factors. It includes pilot study in randomly selected schools for identifying all possible factors impacting the image of government primary schools among parents and guardians. Then selection of schools for detailed questionnaire survey in which importance level of each factor is measured as per schools catchment users. This will result in finding out the most priority factors as per the parents/ guardians from analysis of detailed questionnaire survey. Factors are then analyzed at city level and school (local) level. Recommendations and suggestions are given on both at city and local level. This will help in improving the image of government primary schools from the perspective of parent/ guardians. The findings and recommendations if implemented will lead to increase in enrollment of government primary schools.