Setting up data track on ‘students at risk’ can prevent dropping out

The Guardian
Published at 07:00 AM Jan 10 2025
Data truck illustration
Photo: File
Data truck illustration

IMPROVEMENTS are being made with regard to various stages of schooling as well as its various aspects at a particular level, where one specific focus is checking the pace of secondary school dropouts. Ministerial officials say an electronic modality is being developed to track pupils at risk of dropping out of secondary school due to this or that challenge. The initiative is inserted within the Secondary Education Quality Improvement Programme (SEQUIP) flagship drive.

Notice on the plan for tracking drop out risk pupils was made at the opening of a training for teachers of science, mathematics and computer subjects in Simiyu and Mara regions, which took place in Tarime at midweek.

Just how far this initiative can substantially alter the situation in the secondary education environment is something else, but the effort is untense eniough. There is even a component for ‘safe schools,’ an initiative that has reached 2,262 secondary schools so far.

The World Bank, the brains behind the initiative, sums up its vocation as taking measures that reduce gender-based violence, corporal punishment, bullying and other forms of violence in and around schools. The critical input is that it gives girls better quality choices and opportunities for completing their secondary education. For all those placed nnder the quality uplifting drive, having the skills to tackle challenges and risks that might cause them to drop out is pivotal, indeed for girls and boys alike, despite different challenges.

In a sense, the programme just did the right thing in having taken note of the fact that threats which young people face out of school often follow them to school, especially with day secondary schools. One way out of it is the vast expansion of boarding spaces for girls, while boys by and large remain in day schools for public secondary schools. Ensuring that learning environments are safe and equitable is definitely not just rhetoric even if the climb has thorns to disentangle.

At another level, it can be seen that supporting pupils to complete secondary education with quality learning outcomes, is one thing, amenable to general formula as well as administrative initiatives.  On the other hand,seeking to ensure that those in school do not drop out is a differemt matter; pupils face different intensities of particular challenges in their homes and immediate environment. That isn’t fatal in so many cases where presssure is being experienced, with an effort.

That is why it can be suggested that the ‘safe schools’ drive can in a sense house the drop out risk data track, as abadoning school is an effect of an unsafe environment, partially in school and mainly in the domestic environment. It is within implementation of the safe schools component that education supervisors can identify ‘at risk’ pupils,  first by shielding them from identifiable threats affecting them in genmeral. Then efforts will be made to find specific threats hovering on individual pupils, within that same framework of ‘safe studies.’