Haryana mulls merging high schools into sr sec schools

CHANDIGARH: Haryana education department is considering a proposal to shut down all government high schools in the state and merge them with the government-run senior secondary schools. After this, Haryana will only have senior secondary, middle and primary schools. As of now, there are 1,032 government high schools in the state.

“The motive behind this move is to ensure proper utilisation of post-graduate-teachers (PGTs). As per the proposal, there will be no separate high schools and all those existing high schools would be merged into senior secondary schools. The services of PGTs would then be utilised to teach classes IX to XII. However, a final decision regarding its implementation from the next academic session is yet to be taken,” Haryana education minister Kanwar Pal confirmed to TOI on Tuesday.

The minister also said that it would be a step towards setting up a two-tier school system – the first from Class I to Class VIII and second from Class IX to Class XII.

A senior official of the Haryana education department also confirmed the move as this would help in meeting the shortage of qualified teachers. As of now, several PGTs are posted in high schools and teach students of classes IX and X only. If the high schools are merged into senior secondary schools, the PGTs would teach all the students of classes IX to XII.

Sources added that the Haryana government may merge all primary schools into middle schools as its next step, creating a two-tier school system in the state.

If implemented, this would be the second major step taken by the Haryana government to bring changes in the state’s school education department. In August last year, the BJP-JJP government merged a large number of middle and high schools with less than 20 students and 25 students, respectively, with the nearby available schools.

During the parliamentary budget session, the Union government informed the Rajya Sabha that around 292 government schools in Haryana were either closed or merged in 2022 because of poor numbers of students. The data was shared in response to a question asked by Lt Gen D P Vats (Retd), a member of the Rajya Sabha from Haryana. Satpal Sindhu, president, Haryana School Lecturer Association (HSLA), said this would be a good move, especially in the distribution of work among the school lecturers as many of them are currently deployed in high schools teaching lower classes, whereas their job profile is to teach classes IX to XII.