These stark realities about our education system may or may not come as a surprise to an average reader. It was disconcerting to this writer that the facts noted above appeared to surprise some participants, who should know better, in the high level policy roundtable on education.

The roundtable on April 28, organized jointly by Campe, Unesco, Brac University Institute of Educational Development (BU-IED) and The Daily Star, highlighted the situation in education in Bangladesh and indicated priorities for action.

Over thirty civil society leaders, former education ministers, former and current senior officials and academics engaged in the high profile discourse (mostly on pre-university education) for the first time in the tenure of the caretaker government.

A briefing note recounting essential facts about the education situation, especially at primary and secondary levels, and the literacy status of the population was provided as a backdrop for the roundtable.

Some participants found the background paper on the theme of "education as a human right" too pessimistic. Indeed, one could, of course, describe the same glass of water as half full or half empty.

But when it concerns questions of such fundamental importance as fulfilling the right to primary education for children, or the literacy rate of the population, surely either description is equally unacceptable.

Participants who were until recently at the helm of affairs felt a strong urge to justify their record, and were inclined to be defensive about the current state of education. At least one suggested that the caretaker government had no business discussing education policy issues.

This non-interventionist school of thought clearly did not reflect a sense of urgency about the state of national education. The caretaker government has not been reluctant to deal with major political and economic issues. It could hardly avoid doing so, and put all policy matters on hold, even if the election of a new parliament happened within the minimum possible time.

A former high-level policy-maker strenuously argued that Bangladesh was the leader among the developing countries in achieving progress in literacy rate. The right of anyone to question government statistics, because they were published under "the prime minister's signature," was challenged.

It was claimed that Unesco corroborated the official figures. However, the Unesco participant explained that they only compiled and published the data the governments provided to it.

In fact, Unesco's EFA Global Monitoring Report 2005, which presented Unesco's own assessment, cited literacy rates for Bangladesh, which were consistent with the independent surveys.

A culture of obfuscation of realities by authorities contributed to lack of clarity about basic facts. Another example, besides the confusion about the literacy rate, is the percentage of children enrolled in class one completing the five grades of primary education.

Official documents have been mentioning for several years the figure of 67 percent as the completion rate in primary education. At the same time, data collected from the field by the Directorate General of Primary Education have shown this to be closer to 50 percent. This statistic was confirmed by a separate survey, commissioned under the government's primary education development program known as PEDP II, in 2005.

Fortunately, in spite of the reluctance of some of the roundtable participants to face up to the current realities, substantial commonality of views was expressed about major action priorities.

The key action points on which agreement was expressed included: guarantee of minimum quality in all streams of education including the mainstream schools, madrasahs, and private English medium schools; major decentralisation with area-based local planning and greater school level authority with accountability; access to information for accountable governance; increased resources for education and their better use in the public sector; expansion of relevant vocational/technical skills and lifelong learning; and professional capacity building in the education system.

There was also discussion about the organisational mechanisms for addressing these goals, which included a statutory permanent national education commission and one national ministry of education.

The acting secretary of primary and mass education, Mr Musharraf Hussain Bhuiya, the ranking official representative in the roundtable, had no basic disagreement with the overall diagnosis of the problems and expressed the willingness of the government to work collaboratively with the non-government actors in addressing the problems.

A demonstration of the seriousness of government intentions to address the unhappy realities in education will be to engage in a genuinely open and participatory exercise to re-examine and modify, as necessary, the major on-going development programs in education, including primary education development program (PEDP II), the secondary education initiatives (TQI and SESDP), and the non-formal education projects (PLCE).

Dr. ManzoorAhmed is Director of Brac University Institute of Educational Development (BU-IED).