highest in the country,” according to the World Bank. The Bank reported dropout rates of 39.6 percent for boys and 22.8 percent for girls, compared to the national average of 22.3 and 16.1 percent respectively.59 Other sources report even worse outcomes. As of 2018, according to a UN report, the dropout rate in the district was 45 percent for boys and 30 percent for girls.® The problems are even more acute in the Ukhiya and Teknaf subdistricts of Cox’s Bazar where the camps for Rohingya refugees are located. Bangladesh’s National Education Policy set out the goal of achieving student-teacher ratios of 30:1 in primary and secondary schools by 2018.% Yet census data from 2015 shows that in Ukhiya, 85.5 percent of primary schools had 46 or more students per teacher — as opposed to 71.2 percent in Cox’s Bazar as a whole, and 33.4 percent nationally. Only 2.9 percent of schools in Ukhiya were operating on a single shift - as opposed to 21.6 percent nationally; the rest operated on multiple “shifts” each day, in order to accommodate more children using the insufficiently available schools, classrooms and teachers.® In February 2019, Human Rights Watch visited one primary and two secondary schools in Ukhiya sub-district, which like all Bangladeshi public and private schools in the district, are not open to Rohingya children. The schools had an average of 120 students per classroom, administrators said.& “There are not enough schools for local kids, and sometimes they can’t pay their teachers on time—they come to us to ask for [financial] support,” said the director of a local NGO that has supported Bangladeshi and Rohingya children in Cox’s Bazar since 2008. The NGO worked with schools as well as students who dropped out, he said, like a Bangladeshi boy who left school in order to earn an income for the family after his father 59 World Bank, “Additional Financing for Reaching Out of School Children II,” September 5, 2018, p. 9, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/434911537587044478/pdf/Bangladesh-Reaching-PP-09072018.pdf 60 Joint Response Plan for the Rohingya Humanitarian Crisis, March-December 2018, p. 59, https://www.unocha.org/sites/unocha/files/JRP for Rohingya Humanitarian Crisis 2018.PDF (accessed May 16, 2019). 61 Bangladesh National Education Policy, p. 6, https://reliefweb.int/report/bangladesh/national-education-policy-2010enbn (accessed May 11, 2019). 62 “Upazila Education Performance Profile Based on Annual Primary School Census 2015,” compiled from Bangladeshi government statistics by an international NGO working; Excel sheet data on file with Human Rights Watch. 63 Human Rights Watch interviews, vice-principals and teachers, at public and semi-public elementary and secondary schools, Ukhiya, February 15 and 16, 2019. 27 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | DECEMBER 2019