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Abstract:
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"The concept of Self-managing schools involving local community members, teachers and parents with the formation of School management Committee is gaining ground in Nepal after the world conference WCEFA held in Jomtien, Thailand in the year 1990. Transferring the management of public schools in the hand of willing community and motivating them to reform education by their own ability are self-managed schools. As the government of Nepal has planned to gradually increase the number of self-managed schools throughout the country, a need was realized to assess the readiness of communities (willingness and ability) to resume the delegated responsibility, which was the main reflection of the research study.
The research on self-managed school reflects the community involvement and participation in school management in the line with SMCs to transform the school as self-managed school. Community willingness and ability were the focal points of this research for assessing the readiness of the community to take the responsibility of school management and transforming them into self-managed school. The theoretical framework that supports the research was based upon the critical perspective of Karl Marx conflict theory in education, McClelland’s need theory of motivation, and Deci and Ryan self determination theory, based on which the reflection of community willingness, and ability in self managing school were discussed.
The qualitative method was used for data collection and the sources of data were both primary and secondary in nature. Semi-structured interview was used as a research tools for primary data collection. The secondary data were collected from research department, Ministry of Education, The World Bank reports and educational web portal. The interviewed respondents were the members of the school management committee, which include parents, teachers, head teachers, chairpersons and local community people of three community managed school of Lalitpur district. Triangulation method and cross verification was used for reliability and validity.
The major findings of this research were that despite the community schools located in the poor geographical location, the SMC have become successful in involving the local people in decision-making process. The willingness of communities was found high in terms of participation and involvement in school management. Involvement of the community in school management resulted in high rates of students’ enrolment, improvement in quality of education and introduction of English subject and English speaking environment in the school premises.
The readiness of community was accentuating for resource generation by utilizing unutilized natural resources, for instance, water and forestry. Apart from being isolated from the perspective of financial capabilities, the local communities have the potentialities to develop school so that the local community people do not have to seek for the private school for their children education. In addition, the School Management Committees also demonstrated their skills in participating and involving the students in committee meetings aspiring them to bring healthy suggestion. The commitment of the local communities to manage school also have solved the problems of poor maintenances of school buildings and classroom facilities with the ability to maintain relationship with NGOs, INGOs, CBOs and other business organization to support the school with necessity financial means. In summary, the community of self-managed schools demonstrated both capability and willingness (readiness) for managing schools in a decentralized context."
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