Government schools in India have for long been weighed down by a perception problem: the education they impart is suspected to be low on quality, making for poor learning outcomes, their physical infrastructure too deficient to allow them to focus beyond textbooks, and they are thought to have too few, well-trained teachers .
The National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) is trying do to something to dispel the negative public perception, which has forced parents to turn increasingly to private schools hurting enrolment in government schools.
A parliamentary panel asked the Human Resource Development (HRD) ministry why new admissions to government primary schools had come down by 15% while they had risen by 33% in private schools between 2010-11, 2014-15. The ministry replied that a sprout of private institutes had hit enrolment and some states wanted to set up new English-medium primary schools to reverse the trend.
Introduction of innovative teaching and learning techniques in classrooms, holding regular parent-teacher interactions and starting pre-school classes are some of the steps NCERT is considering as part of a branding exercise aimed at improving the image of government schools.
Read more of this in a report by Neelam Pandey published in Hindustan Times...
