Chennai, May 13 (IANS) Tamil Nadu School Education Department will conduct the ‘Out of School Children’ (OoSC) survey from the last week of May to track the whereabouts of the students and to assess the conditions of the student families.

President of the Social and Economic Study Centre M. K. Muthuvel told that the survey will clear why children in the age group of 6-18 are not attending the schools.

“Those who drop out of schools are either due to financial instability of the parents or due to migration from one district to the other,” Muthuvel said.

He said that if these issues are addressed and the government can convince the parents about the importance of education, then the rate of dropouts and out-of-school children could be minimised to a larger extent.

The survey will be conducted by Block Resource Teacher Educators (BRTE), school headmasters, teachers, Anganwadi teachers, social activists, school management committee members along the Labour Department officials.

Physiotherapists and special educators will also be roped in for the survey as the department is undertaking a study of special children and those with different abilities.

An Education Department official told that special focus will be given to children of migrant labourers as there is a huge presence of migrant labourers in Tamil Nadu from North India and Northeastern states.

He said that a survey, conducted in February 2023, showed a dropout of 1.3 lakh students.

In 2017, a government order said that children who have not attended classes for 30 continuous days will be considered ‘dropouts’. The order also said that those who are irregular will be considered ‘potential dropouts’.

The official said that during a 2023 survey, they identified some schools where the student attendance had not attended classes for more than thirty days.

He said that the department will take stringent action against such schools which have provided fake pictures of the ground-level situation of the school-going children.

The survey in 2024 was delayed after several teachers were involved in election duty as well as in the New India Literacy Programme.