Niti aayog strategy @75
Objective
- Enforcing minimum teacher standards through rigorous teacher eligibility tests and criteria for the induction of teachers.
- Improving in-service teacher training system.
- Increasing teacher accountability for learning outcomes of students.
- Addressing the problem of teacher vacancies and teacher absenteeism.
Current Situation
- National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) is the regulator for teacher education in the country.
- Inadequate accreditation and grading process followed by NCTE has resulted in bad quality of teachers at primary and higher educational level.
- There is a vacancy of 9 lakh teachers in schools, of which 4.2 lakh teacher vacancies are in SSA schools.
- Thirty-three per cent of schools do not meet the pupil-teacher ratio.
Constraints
- insufficient regulatory monitoring of teacher education institutions.
- eligibility test in some states are not adequately robust.
- inadequate in-service training programs as well as lack of public funding support.
Way Forward
- committee to develop transparent/objective and rigorous criteria to recognize institutions.
- Fraudulent or dysfunctional teacher education institutions should be closed as soon as possible.
- In-service teacher professional development programs should be redesigned with continuous progressive development such as peer-learning, demonstration classes, sabbaticals for research/advanced studies etc. eg. NISHTHA
- The Pt. Madan Mohan Malviya National Mission for Teachers & Teaching to “build a strong professional cadre of teachers”, should be taken up in mission mode.
- national electronic teacher registry to bring together employers and job aspirants
- States should test teachers tri-annually on the same test designed for the children they are teaching which will ensure competency of the teacher.
- Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) across states should be strengthened as per central TET through standardization of results, quality benchmarking of testing-items and extending the TET for teachers at pre-school and classes at 9-12 levels.
- Each state must develop a teacher-demand forecast model for all levels, starting from elementary to higher education based on which new training institutions can be instituted.