Pratham, an NGO has carried out a survey in 5 States
viz. Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Assam, Jharkhand and Rajasthan with support from UNICEF and UNESCO.
The study has noted that in the last two decades, impressive strides
have been made in India in terms of providing school buildings,
classrooms, teachers, textbooks and other facilities. These have been
matched by very significant improvements in enrollment. The Annual Study
Status of Education Report (ASER) study ‘Inside Primary Schools”
tracked 30,000 rural children in Std 2 and Std 4 in 900 schools spread
over five States of Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand
and Rajasthan.
The key recommendations emerging from this study are as
below:-
(i) Textbooks need urgent revisions. They need to start from what
children can do and be more realistic and developmentally appropriate in
what children are expected to learn, with clear learning goals and
sequence.
(ii) Systems must be put into place to track attendance, not just
enrollment, and ensure regular reporting and monitoring of this
attendance.
(iii) Mother tongue instruction and programmes for language
transition need to be introduced and expanded.
(iv) Teacher recruitment policies need to assess teachers’ knowledge,
but more importantly their ability to explain content to children, make
information relevant to their lives and use teaching learning materials
and activities other than the textbook.
(v) State teacher education plans should invest in human resource
capacity academic structure, like Block Resource Centres (BRCs) and
Cluster Resource Centres structure, like Block Resource Centres (BRCs)
and Cluster Resource Centres (CRCs) and District Institutes of Education
and Training (DIET) to enable them to help improve teaching and
learning quality via in-service training and classroom visits.
(vi) As per the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education
(RTE) Act, 2009, child-friendly education needs to be defined and
measured regularly as apart of the indicators of quality education.
(vii) Libraries with take home books for reading practice at the
household level, should be monitored as part of RTE indicators. Family
reading programmes could also be part of innovations to help support
first generation schools goers.
The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act,
2009 has become operative with effect from 1st April, 2010 and SSA norms
have been revised to correspond with the provisions of RTE Act, 2009 in
order to ensure quality elementary education to children of age group
from 6-14 years throughout the country including these five States.
This information was given by Dr. D. Purandeswari, Minister of State
for Human Resource in Rajya Sabha
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