Factors contributing to students’ dropout in grant-aided national and district boarding secondary schools in northern education division in malawi

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.