NCERT To Adopt Village Schools Near Bhubaneswar

New Delhi: The National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) has proposed a programme to adopt village schools neighbouring Bhubaneswar to help them improve their learning outcome.

The Regional Institute of Education (RIE), a constituent unit of NCERT, will execute the plan. RIE teachers will visit the village schools to help them in improving their standard of education, news portal The Print has reported.

The programme will be launched on a pilot basis at places with an RIE. Besides Bhubaneswar, it will be implemented in Ajmer (Rajasthan), Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh) and Mysore (Karnataka).

The Adoption:

“Our teachers will visit these schools regularly to interact with students and teachers and find out about their problems. If they need help like teaching assistance or resources, our teachers will provide them with that,” NCERT Director Hrusikesh Senapati said.

If the initial plan proves successful, the adoption programme could be expanded to all the states. The programme will be taken up full steam in Tripura which had reached out to NCERT for assistance.

Senapati said more teachers and institutes such as the IITs could be roped in at a later stage.

Challenges Before NCERT:

NCERT, which formulates syllabus and governs the standard of pre-primary, primary, secondary and higher secondary education in the country, has been confronted with the challenge of quality outcome in classes.

Its own studies have revealed that the learning level remains abysmally low in government schools across rural and urban centres in India. Surveys carried out over successive years have shown that a Class V student is unable to solve basic Class III level Maths such as addition and subtraction.

Senapati said the inputs and the feedback from the initial adoption of the village school programme will help NCERT to prepare the national education curriculum framework. The inputs might reflect in the next round of change in the school syllabus.

“The inputs that we get from the initial survey of schools under the adoption programme will be used for NCF. It will be clear from the inputs what the students actually need to learn and where they lag behind. All of this will be kept in mind while preparing the new syllabus,” Senapathy told The Print.