In view of the growing demand for government-run English medium schools for students between class 6 and 8, UP basic education department will establish 1,000 upper primary schools, said Sarvendra Vikram Bahadur Singh, director, basic education. (HT file)

In a first, the state government has decided to come up with 1,000 English medium junior high schools across Uttar Pradesh, said an official.

In view of the growing demand for government-run English medium schools for students between class 6 and 8, the basic education department will establish 1,000 upper primary schools, said Sarvendra Vikram Bahadur Singh, director, basic education, on Thursday.

In addition to this, 5,000 more English medium primary schools will come up in the state.

The basic education department will establish an English medium junior high school in every block while an additional one would come up in those blocks where the demand for such schools is higher, he said.

For this, the department will not construct new buildings. Instead, the existing Hindi medium junior high schools would be converted into English medium schools, he added.

The decision to establish English medium schools was taken because students in many English medium primary schools wanted to study class 6 to 8 in schools where medium of education is English, he said.

In 2015, the basic education department had converted a few primary schools of Uttar Pradesh into English medium institutions. After BJP came to power in 2017, basic education minister Anupama Jaiswal announced to open 5,000 English medium primary schools, assessing their popularity among students.

At present, 4,97,108 students are studying in these government-run English medium primary schools. “In Lucknow alone, there are 44 such schools where over 6,200 students are enrolled,” said Amar Kant Singh, basic shiksha adhikari, Lucknow.

Students and principals of English medium primary schools have welcomed the initiative. Principals said many of the kids been saying that kids do not want to switch to Hindi medium learning after finishing Class 5, said an official.

Hariyali Srivastava, assistant teacher at primary school Gejha, said the problem was that most students coming to government run primary schools hailed from humble backgrounds.

“Their parents can’t afford to send them to private English medium schools in Class 6, as the fee is very high,” she said.

Chhavi Agarwal, assistant teacher of another primary school, said she teaches 280 students. “Similar requests are pouring in from my students too.”

Kajal Kumari, a student of English medium primary school Gejha in Gautam Buddh Nagar said, “We are happy that government was so thoughtful and decided to open up 1000 English medium Junior high schools.”

“Switching back to Hindi will not be easy. We have been requesting authorities to please do something so that we may continue to study in English after passing Class 5. After a lot of hard work, we developed a comfort level in English medium learning. Now, if we go back to Hindi learning, it will undo whatever we learnt over the past few years.”