Abstract

Dayal Talukder

The government of Bangladesh formulated the female secondary education enhancement policy in the mid 1990s with a view to increasing enrolment of female secondary students. The study has analysed the impacts of this policy on female secondary education. It has applied index number approach and used secondary data to analyse the policy-impacts through changes in the patterns of female secondary student enrolment - the gross enrolment ratio, net enrolment ratio, net attendance rate, and gender parity and disparity indices in secondary education. It has found that this policy has positively impacted on the the rate of enrolment with a significant increase in student numbers but failed to reduce the drop-out rate. The government should formulate complementary education policy to achieve the quantity and quality in female secondary education. The findings and implications of the policy analysis of this study may be of interest to researchers, development practitioners and policy makers.