Himalayan News Service

Kathmandu, April 4:

With the aim to find out the main cause behind high rate of failure in School Leaving Certificate examination, a year-long study is going to be launched next week under the leadership of Kedar Bhakta Mathema, ex- vice chancellor of Tribhuwan University.

The study will cover 20,000 students of 500 schools in all the five development regions of the country. The Danish International Development Assistance (DANIDA) has agreed to provide Rs 1 crore for the research. The study will be the first of its kind to conduct in-depth research on the causes behind the increasing failure rate in the SLC examination."We will focus on the determinants and try to find out long-term solutions," said Mathema. "The main achievement of the study will be the effective implementation of the recommendations by the government in order to improve the quality of education," he added. The results spiralled down to 32.5 per cent in 2003 which was 31 per cent in 2002. The study team consists of educationists, sociologists, financial analysts, institutional experts, political analysts and psychological and curriculum experts.

The programme was scheduled to be launched a year ago when the Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) had written to DANIDA to conduct the research as the result in two consecutive years had dropped down.Even though some researches had been conducted by the education ministry in previous years, they focused on the examination system only. In 2003, 1,39,114 students from public schools appeared for the SLC examination out of which only 31,570 students passed.