Towards
ENSURING quality Education
*Ghanshyam
Goel
The
department of School Education & Literacy is taking several steps to make
school education job-oriented and qualitative. The Department is implementing a
component of Vocationalisation of Secondary & Higher Secondary Education
under Centrally sponsored scheme of Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA)
with an aim to prepare educated, employable and competitive youth for various
sectors of the economy and global market. It also envisages to fill the gap
between educated and employable, reduce the dropout rate at the secondary level
and decrease the pressure on academic higher education. The scheme involves
introduction of job-oriented vocational subjects in sectors like Retail,
Automobile, Agriculture, Telecommunication, Healthcare, Beauty & Wellness,
IT-ITes, Electronics, Security, Media & Entertainment, etc. along with the
general education subjects from class IX to class XII.
For
granting academic equivalence to students of Industrial training Institutes
(ITIs) affiliated with National Council for Vocational Training (NCVT),
Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed by National Institute of Open
Schooling (NIOS), an autonomous organisation of Ministry of Human Resource
Development with the Directorate General of Training, Ministry of Skill
Development & Entrepreneurship on 15th July, 2016. The MoU
provides a mechanism for grant of Secondary and Senior Secondary certificate to
ITI students/passouts who have pursued two years of ITI course, after class 8th
and 10th respectively.
In
order to provide quality education to students at the secondary level, various interventions
are funded under RMSA. These include provisions for:
(i)
additional
Teachers to improve Pupil Teacher ratio,
(ii)
induction
and In-service training for Teachers and Principals including leadership
training
(iii)
Maths
and Science kits
(iv)
ICT
facilities in school,
(v)
Lab
equipments
(vi)
Special
teaching for learning enhancement.
Under
Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), the State Governments and UT Administrations are
supported on several interventions to improve teaching standards, including
regular in-service teachers’ training, induction training for newly recruited
teachers, training of untrained teachers to acquire professional
qualifications, additional teachers for improving pupil-teacher ratio, academic
support for teachers through block and cluster resource centres, continuous
and comprehensive evaluation to equip the teacher to measure pupil performance
and provide remedial action wherever required, and teacher and school grants
for development of appropriate teaching-learning materials, etc. The Right of
Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 specifies statutory
duties and responsibilities of teachers and lays down the minimum qualifications
for a person to be eligible for appointment as a teacher in elementary schools.
Under SSA, textbooks are provided to all children in Government/Local Body and
Government aided schools, including Madarsas desirous of introducing the State
curriculum, within an upper ceiling of Rs. 150/-per child at primary level and
Rs. 250/- per child at upper primary level. The SSA norms also provide for 2
Sets of uniforms to children from the deprived community viz. all girls, SC, ST
and BPL boys, @ Rs. 400 per head. It also supports States/UTs on early grade
reading, writing & comprehension, and early Mathematics programmes through
a sub-programme namely ‘Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat’ (PBBB) in classes I and II.
Further the Government has launched
Rashtriya Aavishkar Abhiyan (RAA) programme on 09.07.2015, inter alia, as a
sub-component of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and RMSA to motivate and engage children
of the age group of 6-18 years in Science, Mathematics and Technology through
observation, experimentation, inference drawing, model building, etc. both
through inside and outside classroom activities.
For improving the quality of school
education, the School Standards & Evaluation framework, known as ‘Shaala
Siddhi’ has been developed by National University of Educational Planning and
Administration (NUEPA), to enable schools to evaluate their performance in a
more focused and strategic manner and to facilitate them to make professional
judgments for improvement.
In order to improve quality of
education, the National Council of Educational Research & Training (NCERT)
conducts periodic national surveys of learning achievement of children in grade
III, V, VIII and X. Four rounds of National Achievement Survey (NAS) have been
conducted so far for grade V and three rounds for classes III & VIII. These
reveal improvement in learning achievement levels of pupils, in identified
subjects from first round to fourth round. From the current year onwards, the
Government has decided to conduct annual National Achievement Surveys covering
all students from class 1-8 in all Government and Government aided schools. The
students learning assessment will be according to the Learning Outcomes
developed by NCERT for all subjects covering all classes in the elementary
cycle.
*****
*Author is Director
General (M&C), posted at PIB, New Delhi. The article is based on the inputs
received from M/o Human Resource Development.