The Indian School puts forth diligent efforts to keep its team of educators well-versed with the changing trends in education and their respective disciplines. From capacity building programmes to soft skills training seminars, the teachers regularly mark their presence at these training events.
However, this time around, the opportunity to update and upgrade the School teaching faculty was presented by the unscheduled holidays declared by DOE due to smog conditions in Delhi. Not missing this chance, an impromptu but extremely well-planned workshop on The National Education Policy, 2019 was conducted by Ms Tania Joshi, Principal, The Indian School on November 4, 2019.
The challenges being faced by the current education system like Access, Equity, Quality, Affordability and Accountability were discussed in detail, followed by the salient features of the draft.
The audience sat riveted through the highly interesting and informative powerpoint presentation as Ms Joshi discussed all the relevant points.
The presentation offered a birds eye view of the revised education policy:
1) Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE), aims that every child in the age range of 3-8 years has access to free, safe, high quality, developmentally appropriate care and education by 2025.
2) Currently, the RTE Act provides for free and compulsory education to all children from 6 to 14 years. The Draft Policy recommends extending the ambit of the RTE Act to include early childhood education and secondary school education. This would extend the coverage of the Act to all the children between the ages of 3 to 18 years.
3) The Draft Policy recommends that the recent amendments to the RTE Act on Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation must be reviewed. It also states that there should be No Detention of children till class 8. Schools must ensure that children are achieving age-appropriate learning levels.
4) The current structure of the school education must be restructured on the basis of the development needs of the students. This would consist of a 5334 design comprising of: 5 years of foundational stage (3 years of Pre-Primary School and classes I and II) 3 years of preparatory stage (Classes 3 to 5) 3 years of middle stage (Classes 6 to 8) 4 years of Secondary Stage (Classes 9 to 12)
5) The Committee also envisages that the school complexes will also include: -Anganwadis -Vocational Education Facilities -Adult Education Centre
6) According to NEP, the teachers should be deployed with a particular school complex for at least 5 to 7 years and will not be allowed to participate in any non-teaching activities (such as cooking mid-day meals or participating in vaccination campaigns) during school hours that could affect their teaching capacities.
7) For Teacher Training, the existing B.Ed. programme will be replaced by a four-year integrated B.Ed. that combines high-quality content, pedagogy and practical learning.
8) The Committee noted that the current Higher Education system has multiple regulators with overlapping mandates. This reduces the autonomy of higher educational institutions and creates an environment of dependency and centralised decision making. Therefore, it proposes setting up the National Higher Education Regulatory Authority (NHERA).
9) Higher education institutes will be restructured into three types: i) Research Universities focussing equally on research and teaching ii) Teaching Universities focussing primarily on teaching and iii) Colleges focussing only on teaching at undergraduate levels.
10) The Draft Policy seeks to double the public investment in education from the current 10% of total public expenditure to 20% in the next 10 years.
11) All school students must receive vocational education in at least one vocation in grades 9 to 12.
12) Adult Education Centres will be included within the proposed school complexes. Relevant courses for youth and adults will be made available at the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS).
13) Introduced by the first National Education Policy, the three-language formula stated that state governments should adopt and implement the study of a modern Indian language, preferably one of the southern languages, apart from Hindi and English in the Hindi speaking states, and of Hindi along with the regional language and English in the non-Hindi speaking states.
Thereafter, the teachers pondered over the feasibility of the proposals made in the draft policy. The house was divided at large between those who welcomed the proposed changes and the regular cynics.
All in all, the workshop was successful in spreading awareness on NEP 2019 and in rejuvenating jaded ideas and setting the stage for some newly minted ones.
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