With the objective to ascertain whether students in Government and aided schools have the knowledge befitting their age and standard, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) is going to conduct achievement tests across Tamil Nadu.
Circular
In a circular dated November 4, issued to all 32 districts, SSA State Project Director Pooja Kulkarni directed all the Additional Chief Educational Officers (SSA) to assess the learning skills of students in classes III, V and VIII.
Official sources told The Hindu here on Thursday that around 6,600 students in Coimbatore and Tirupur are expected to take the tests in Coimbatore SSA.
SSA State headquarters had directly selected 10 schools from each block for each of the three Standards, making it a total of 30 schools per block.
Inspection
The Block Resource Centres have been asked to inspect the schools in the list with the help of Block Resource Trainers, Supervisors, and Headmasters of the Government schools.
Further, the SSA State Project Director told the district officials to ensure that there were at least 10 students in every class selected to take the achievement tests. She directed the department officials to conduct inspections in all schools before finalising the list where the achievement tests would be held. The district level officials had been directed to complete the inspections and notify of any changes in the list of schools before November 7.
Tests
The tests would be conducted for students of the Government, municipality, Adi Dravidar Welfare and aided schools.
The Coimbatore SSA consisted of 22 blocks including 15 in Coimbatore and seven in Tirupur.
The block level officials had already completed the preliminary work of inspecting all the schools identified by the SSA State headquarters, sources here said.
Officials said that there were a total of 252 Government high and higher secondary schools, 1,482 panchayat union primary and middle schools, 94 municipality schools, 227 aided schools and 47 Adi Dravidar Welfare schools in the 22 SSA blocks.