Reforms Boost For School And Mass Education

Bhubaneswar: To ensure quality education at the primary and secondary level, the Odisha government on Thursday announced a slew of reforms in the School and Mass Education sector.

Giving details of the reforms to be undertaken by the state government to the media persons here, secretary, School and Mass Education Pradipta Kumar Mohapatra said the School and Mass Education department has taken the responsibility of education from Class I to Class XII.

He said as per the MoU signed by 15 states including Odisha with the Niti Aayog to implement the reforms, the latter had chosen three states—Odisha, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh.

“As it is observed that there is learning deficiency with the students and the teachers, the main objective of the programme is to increase the overall learning outcome for the students and the teachers as well. To overcome the existing lacunae, 15 major initiatives have been taken up for the overall reforms of the School and Mass Education department,” Mohapatra said.

Talking about the initiatives to be taken up by his department, he said one of the initiatives is rationalisation. “It is found that at some places, the primary school, upper primary school and the high school situated in close proximity are running in separate entities with three headmasters. It has been decided that these three institutions found in close proximity would be merged into one entity with one headmaster. The objective behind the merge is to ensure the teacher-student ratio at 1:10,” he explained.

Another initiative is to maintain transparency in the transfer of the state and district cadre primary and secondary teachers. “Every year, the government faces immense difficulties in sorting out a number of cases filed by the teachers in the court against their transfer order. Keeping this in view, it has been decided that henceforth, the transfer of these teachers would be made online from the next year. If a teacher is willing to be transferred to other place, he/she will have to apply online. As the government has laid out standard policy on transfer, there would be no manipulation. This would also relieve the government of spending huge amount towards disposing such cases in the court,” Mohapatra pointed out.

“The third initiative is remediation. Under this programme, the learning outcome of the students would be properly assessed in three parameters—Ujjwal, Utthan and Utkarsh. Under the Ujjwal parameter, the learning outcome of the students from Class-I to Class-V would be assessed while under Utthan and Utkarksh parameters, the learning outcome of the students of Class-VI and VII and the students of Class-VIII, IX and X would be assessed respectively. The students of Class-IX and X will have a specialised focus on four subjects so that they would be able to compete with other students across the country in all-India entrance test. As part of this initiative, we have fixed a three-week training programme from April 17 to May 7 for 1.75 lakh primary teachers to enhance their learning outcome and teaching ability,” the secretary informed.

He further said that the state government has decided to bring down the number of the directorates under the School and Mass Education department from 14 to 7. “The School and Mass Education department has two wings. One is OPEPA (Odisha Primary Education Programme Authority) and RMSA (Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan). As per the decision taken by the Union Cabinet, these two wings will be merged. Overall, there will be three directorates—Directorate of Elementary Education (to deal with education from Class-I to VIII), Directorate of Secondary Education (Class-IX and X) and Directorate of Higher Secondary Education (Class-XI and XII).

“Another major initiative is recruitment of teachers. Earlier, the teachers were recruited on the basis of the marks they had secured. In course of time, we found that the teachers, who had scored 35 percent marks in the High School Certificate examinations, have managed to have the B.Ed degree with even 98 percent marks from some unknown institutions outside Odisha. As most of the states have introduced competitive examinations for recruitment of teachers, the Odisha government would also recruit the teachers through competitive examinations to be conducted by the Odisha Staff Selection Commission. Once we get the good stuff, our product will be good,” Mohapatra observed.