Abstract:
Drop out of students from schools is a widespread problem globally. This research was a
comparative study aimed at investigating factors that contribute to students’ dropout in grant-aided
national and district boarding secondary schools in the Northern Education Division in
Malawi. The study adopted the Social and Academic Integration theory by Vincent Tinto
(1975) who argues that students drop out of school if they are insufficiently integrated into
different aspects of the school culture due to several traits.
The study employed a pragmatic paradigm which advocates the use of mixed methods, a
combination of quantitative and qualitative methods when collecting data. This study used
convergent mixed method design and was conducted in four grant-aided national and four
district boarding secondary schools. Both primary and secondary sources of data were used,
particularly data was collected using questionnaires, interviews and document analysis. The
research study sample comprised 254 participants that were selected using purposive, simple
random and snowballing sampling: four Education Officers, eight head-teachers, three PTA
members, 16 form teachers, 215 form three government selected students, four school dropouts
and their parents (4). Descriptive statistics in form of frequency were used to analyse
quantitative data using SPSS version 20 and Microsoft (MS) Excel. Qualitative data was
analyzed using thematic content analysis.
The study findings revealed high dropout rates of students in both grant-aided national and
district boarding secondary schools with most boys dropping out. The study also found that
poverty, direct and indirect costs of school significantly influenced drop out of students from
both school types. Early marriages and pregnancies were also one of the major factors for high
dropout rates for girls. However, it was found that girls had more opportunities to access
funding for their studies from various organizations than the boys.
The study suggested some intervention measures to the challenges. The suggestions made
included urging the government to come up with deliberate policies that would help reduce
male student’s dropout rate. The study recommended making secondary education free to all
deserving students amongst many other recommendations.
