#Title

DOUBLE-SHIFT SCHOOLS

Students losing out on learning hours
MOHIUDDIN ALAMGIR
Double shift primary schools deprive the children of up to a third of the student contact hours compared to the schools with just one shift.
Last year, 81 percent of the 65,567 government primary schools took classes divided in shifts: one group attended in the morning and another later in the day.
Student contact hours are the time pupils spend learning in contact with a teacher.
Class 1 and 2 students at the double shift schools had 137 fewer teacher-student contact hours than the children who went to single-shift schools in 2023, according to the Directorate of Primary Education.
Class 3, 4, and 5 students had 515 fewer, or 34 percent less, contact hours at double shift schools.
“Students of double shift schools are facing discrimination,” said Prof Hosne Ara Begum, acting director of the Institute of Education and Research (IER) at Dhaka University.
Since they have fewer contact hours, they almost certainly learn less, she said.
Compared to many other countries, the duration of learning time at double shift schools in Bangladesh is short, said Prof Siddiqur Rahman, former director of the IER.
“The curriculum is designed with the assumption that all students will attend single shift schools,” he added.
Farid Ahmed, secretary at the primary education ministry, said the government was gradually transforming the double shift schools to single shift ones.
The government in June announced that it would transform 12,515 double shift government primary schools into single shift from January next year, he added.
DISCRIMINATION
More than 1 crore children go to 65,567 government primary schools across the country, according to the Annual Primary School Census 2023.
Of the schools, only 12,515 were single shift.
The government’s 4th Primary Education Development Programme aimed to raise contact hours at single shift schools to 1,000 for classes 1 and 2 and 1,500 hours for classes 3, 4 and 5, said the Annual Sector Performance Report 2021 of the Directorate of Primary Education.
At double shift schools, the target is 800 hours for classes 1 and 2 and 1,000 hours for classes 3, 4 and 5.
The most ambitious target is to lower the number of double shift schools by 50 percent within June 2025.
But the progress has been slow: 14 percent
SEE PAGE 6 COL 1