Federal think tank NITI Aayog has suggested merging schools with smaller student populations and optimising teacher assignments to address teacher shortages.
According to a report published by The Print, the suggestions were included in an October report under project SATH-E (Sustainable Action for Transforming Human Capital — Education), which was launched by the NITI Aayog in 2017 to assist states in raising the standard of instruction at neighbourhood schools. The report’s contents were made public on Tuesday.
Jharkhand, Odisha, and Madhya Pradesh were chosen to carry out the project, even though 16 states had replied to the NITI Aayog’s project proposal and representatives from 14 states had gone on to give presentations on the state of the education sector in their respective states, according to the report.
The recent report offers suggestions for a nationwide enhancement in the standard of public school education by building on the results seen in these three states, The Print article added.
The report outlines issues like limited resources in schools, teacher vacancies, means to improve the quality of teaching, accountability towards learning outcomes, early childhood education (ECE), contextualised mother tongue-based multilingual education (MLE), and improving the governance structures in education departments.
“The interventions of Project SATH-E are in synchronisation with NEP [Nation Education Policy]-2020. The state governments of Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha have been resiliently working on the NEP-2020 implementation roadmaps as the SATH-E states are pioneering contextualised interventions for it, which will help in attaining grade-level learning competencies,” BVR Subrahmanyam, CEO of NITI Aayog said in the report published by The Print.
Subrahmanyam said: “The NEP-2020 aims to address the growing educational development imperatives of our country. The States/UTs [union territories] now need to adapt and pivot their strategies aligning to NEP-2020 to achieve its targets in a time-bound manner. This will ensure that each student in India gets quality education that enables them to be agents of change in our society. Project SATH-E is a landmark contribution of NITI Aayog in this direction.”
