Context:

• The Committee for Draft National Education Policy (Chair: Dr. K. Kasturirangan) Report discussed in Parliament.
• The report proposes an education policy, which seeks to address the challenges of:
• Access
• Equity
• Quality
• Affordability, and
• Accountability faced by the current education

School Education:

Early Childhood Care and Education:

• Curriculum that doesn’t meet the developmental needs of children,
• Lack of qualified and trained teachers, and
• Substandard pedagogy

Draft Policy recommends developing a two-part curriculum for early childhood care and education. This will consist of:

Guidelines for up to three-year-old children (for parents and teachers), and

Educational framework for three to eight-year-old

The Right to Education Act, 2009 (RTE Act):

• Currently, the RTE Act provides for free and compulsory education to all children from the age of six 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 children between the ages of three to 18 years.

School Exam Reforms:

• The Committee noted that the current board examinations:
• Force students to concentrate only on a few subjects
• Do not test learning in a formative manner, and
• Cause stress among
• To track students’ progress throughout their school experience, the draft Policy proposes State Census Examinations in classes three, five and eight.
• it recommends restructuring the board examinations to test only core concepts, skills and higher order capacities.

Teacher Management:

• The Committee noted that there has been a steep rise in teacher shortage, lack of professionally qualified teachers, and deployment of teachers for non-educational purposes.
• The draft Policy recommends that teachers should be deployed with a particular school complex for at least five to seven years.
• Teachers 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.
• The Ministry of Human Resources and Development must be renamed as the Ministry of Education in order to bring focus back on education.

Financing Education:

• The Draft Policy reaffirmed the commitment of spending 6% of GDP as Public Investment in Education.