Determinants of Primary school dropout in Chitwan and Nawalparasi

Abstract

Nepal’s school education is structured as early childhood development (ECD)/ pre-primary level (PPC), primary level, lower secondary, secondary and higher secondary education.Primary level provides five years of education to the 5-9 years of school-going age children andconsists of five grades I-V.The primary school dropout is defined as “any student who leaves school for any reason before graduation or completion of a program of studies without transferring to another elementary or secondary school.” The objective of research is to find out the causes of dropout in primary schools of the study districts. The null hypotheses based on objectives are there is no significant difference between the primary school dropout children of boys and girls,at various grades andgovernment andprivate school. A cross-sectional tracer design study was conducted in 30 sampled schools of Chitwanand Nawalparasi districts.The pre-designed questionnaire was used for interview method tocollect information about dropout and studying children from one of the parent. The interviewed were taken from one of parents of 101 and 109 actual dropout children respectively from Chitwan and Nawalparasi districts.To fit the logistic regression model,250 parents of studying children were selected by using stratified random sampling and the interviews were taken. The highest actual dropout rate was found to be 6.69 percent in grade I and followed by5.24percent, 3.66 percent, 2.48 percent and 3.66 percent in grades II, III, IV and V respectively.The dropout rate for girl (4.04%) was less than boys (4.50%). The boys (52.6%) were more dropped out than girls (47.6%).The overall primary school dropout rate was found to be 4.26 percent in these study districts. The mean age of primary school dropout children is 8.74 years with standard deviation of 2.021 years.Dalit caste comprised of around 30.5 percent of dropped out children and they have higher chances of dropped out. The majority (73.3%) of dropout children were found to be Hindu by religion followed by Buddhist (21.4%) and Muslim and others (5.2%).The maximum (42.2%) of the actual dropout was due to illiteracy and negligenceof parents in the education of their children. Other causes of dropout were household work(38.5%) and poor economic status of parents (26.6%). Education status of the father plays animportant role in children education and if he is illiterate the chances of dropout is very high. Fromlogistic regression analysis of child related variables, grade, age and work at homewere found to be significant variable and among family related variables, parent’s apathy towards their children education, education status of father, education status of mother,occupation status of father and number of children in family were found to be significant. Government of Nepal should make the provision of automatic upgradation at primary grades so that any child will not dropout due to failure in examination or repetition. Decreasingthe dropout rate requires attraction for dropped out children,active participation of parents, local communities and government working in conjunction with one another.