Govt moots proposal to enhance educational standards

Updated on: Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Government mooted a proposal for an "institutional framework" to strengthen Centre-state collaboration in raising educational standards under the RTE regime with the involvement of key education regulators.
Such a framework would include educational bodies like NCERT, State Councils of Educational Research and Trainings (SCERT), CBSE, Council of Boards of School Education in India (COBSE) and National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE).

The proposal was mooted by HRD Minister Kapil Sibal at the meeting of central and state education regulatory bodies with an aim to ensure "constant coordination, continuous flow of information and dialogues between them", said an HRD
Ministry official.

Sibal also said that the institutional mechanism between NCERT and SCERTs should also work towards developing question banks which could be used by states for their Teacher Eligibility Test.

He said that while the NCTE is developing the standards and benchmarks for the eligibility test, State Governments would be responsible for administering these tests and ensure that these tests conform to high standards.

During the meeting, Sibal also underlined that the effort of the educational administrators and curriculum developers should be to maximise standards rather than settling for mediocre standards.

The NCERT in its presentation at the meeting said the Government was proposing to set up a 24 hour Channel for teaching through ICT.

The NCERT would be the nodal agency for this channel and the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) and the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) would be the collaborating agencies.

The target audience for this channel would be school students in the 5-18 years age group, open education students and neo-adult literates.

Talking about the proposed National Vocational Qualification Framework, Sibal said the Government has begun a series of consultations with different industry groups to facilitate development of vocational curriculum as demanded by the needs/job requirements of these industry groups.

The state education ministers are also expected to meet in this regard here this week.

Govt moots proposal to enhance educational standards

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