A Brief History

1. CONTEXTUALIZING EDUCATION SECTOR

1.1. A Brief History

Education in Nepal officially started when the then ruling Rana family established the first modern school - Durbar High School 1 in 1853 AD. It was essentially meant to cater to the elite members of the Rana regime. On the other hand, the remainder of the population relied on homeschooling and gurukuls for their education 2 .

Until the 1950s, education remained an exclusive privilege for the wealthy elites with less than 1 percent of the population attending schools, which was reflected in the then literacy rate that stood at a mere 5 percent. Similarly, the country did not have any universities at the time and only had a few hundred schools in existence. It was only after the downfall of the Rana regime that the access to formal education started expanding. 3

Post-1950s, the education sector witnessed transformations post democratization which resulted in education reaching a larger mass. It was only then that a uniform contemporary education system was introduced to the public. Up until 1971, the education sector in Nepal was mostly nationalized. Reforms such as the National Education System Plan (NESP) were introduced in 1971, which paved the way for a more modern and egalitarian education system that focused on compulsory public basic education. Under the NESP, all community-run schools were brought under the national bracket. The plan also started providing government assistance to existing private schools 4 . The reform attempted to create a unified system of public education to empower District Education Offices (DEOs) to run schools. However, School Management Committees (SMCs) were not included in this system, further limiting the benefits of such platforms to selected elite groups.

The first private school established in Nepal was Adarsh Vidya Mandir in 1966 AD 5 . Prior to the nationalization of all schools by NESP in 1971, private schools were already in operation. There were two types of private schools, both of which ran under the motive of ‘not-for-profit’- either government-aided or unaided. The seventh amendment to the

education act in 2002 made several arrangements regarding the registration of private schools. After this amendment, private schools were allowed to be registered as a notfor-profit (trust) or for-profit (company). The education act further allowed private schools to be affiliated with foreign education institutions. This gave rise to the proliferation of private schools, as the amendment gave individuals the motive to open and run a private school. People started associating the private schools with profit making and this gave rise to the wave of privatization in the private education sector 6 .

By the late 1980s, the need for urgent reforms in schooling was felt. In this background, a comprehensive US-funded study named ‘Improving Efficiency of Educational Systems (IEES)’ was carried out, which revealed the institutional weaknesses in the central educational bureaucracy and recommended renewed decentralization of educational management 7 .

Various events contributed to the gradual progress of the education sector. Several milestones like the introduction of NESP and the People’s Movement of 1990 contributed to this. This was reflected in the Net Enrollment Ratio (NER), which had risen from 16% in 1980 to 83.5% in 2003 8 . Despite the rise in NER, the quality of public schools remained low, and the demand for private schools surged. The public started associating private schools with better quality due to their School Leaving Certificate (SLC) 9 performance and also because education in private schools was conducted in English. Furthermore, extracurricular activities offered by the private schools were also a demand driver as it persevered towards the overall development of students. Due to this growing disillusionment coupled with the public school system’s continued poor performance, the number of private schools surged as shown in figure 1. An analysis of the 2004 SLC results demonstrates that public schools, on average, had a pass rate of only 38% while it was 85% for private schools 10 . By 2015, the performance of the public schools worsened as the pass rate reduced to 33.5% whilst the pass rate of private schools improved to reach 89.8%. This meant that close to 70% of the students who studied in public schools failed whilst only about 10% of the students failed the SLC Examinations from private schools 11 . Given the continual dismal performance of public schools over the decades, it was evident that the popularity of private schools would surge.