School Overcrowding and Infrastructure Needs for the Development of the Educational System in Palestine

Abstract

The school building is one of the important elements in the educational process, and it is the place where the teaching-learning process activities run. Also, the situation of the school environment and building has an impact on the educational quality and results.

Given the above fact, the Palestinian Ministry of Education did and still do its best to reform and improve the damaged infrastructure caused by the long years of the Israeli occupation. Since the Ministry of Education started its control on the Palestinian education system in August 1994, as a result of the peace process in the Middle East and the Israeli – Palestinian Declaration of Principles signed on 13 September 1993, it began its activities in the field of organizing the maintenance process and the construction of new school buildings or expanding the old ones. With limited resources, the infrastructure construction went slowly, and there is a big difference in the growth of the school buildings and the growth in the number of students, which caused a significant lack in the classrooms, one of the important factors and problems that the Palestinian education system suffers from, and caused as a result a significant overcrowding in the classes.

This bad case for the infrastructure and school has influenced the class density rate and the overcrowding in the classes, and hence the consistency and the progress of the education process. The main of this paper is to analyze this problem and to estimate the needs of the Palestinian education system for classrooms to solve the overcrowding phenomenon.