Primary Education in Bangladesh

Bangladesh has one of the biggest primary education systems in the world. There are 365,925 primary school teachers (approximately 55% of teachers and 25% of head teachers are women), working in more than 82,218 schools (with eleven different types of schools, including Madrasahs). The Government of Bangladesh recognises education as a means of reducing poverty and improving the quality of life for children. As a participant to the Agreement on the Rights of the Child, the Government of Bangladesh has made positive steps towards fulfilling children's rights to education, according to the Education for All and Millennium Development Goals with assistance from development partners. As a result, Bangladesh has made remarkable progress towards achieving universal primary education and gender parity in schools.

Despite many achievements during the past decade, major improvements are still needed in order for all children to receive the benefit of quality education. The major challenges include: poor quality of education; high dropout rates; decentralization of education administration; and special needs education. The quality of the teaching-learning process, the school environment and children's learning achievements are also major challenges. Poor qualifications and lack of teacher motivation are major challenges. A remarkable portion of government primary schools and registered non- government primary schools teachers are untrained. The traditional and dominant way of teaching in most schools tends to focus on memorizing facts. There is little emphasis on developing analytical, practical or vocational skills.

 

Recently government took different attempts to face the challenges and ensure quality education, with proper assistance of development partners. Such as, opened pre-primary with all primary schools and developed pre-primary curriculum, changed primary curriculum and textbooks, changed teacher education curriculum, recruited thousands of new and high qualified teachers etc. The Government provided free textbooks for all children in Bangladesh at the very beginning of the academic year.