The National Centre for Education Development (NCED), with support from British Council, decided to provide the training after significant number of students started to quit public schools to join private ones mainly because of English medium classes.

The first phase of the training, under the National Initiative to Improve Teaching in English, will start from Jhapa, Nawalparasi and Surkhet as a pilot project and it will be gradually expanded to other districts.

According to NCED chief Khag Raj Baral, around 450 teachers from the three districts will be trained in the first phase while around 7,000 teachers across the

country will be trained by the end of upcoming academic session.

“A majority of good performing public schools teach in English medium. Therefore, through this initiative we hope to retain students in public schools,” he said.

Baral said schools across the country need support in strengthening English medium classes and that many schools themselves have started campaign to promote such classes.

A rough estimation of the NCED shows that around 40 percent of schools in the Capital and around 10 percent in the rest of the country have started offering English medium classes. Currently, there are around 90,000 primary level teachers in around 29,000 public schools across the country.