It promises to be a year of new beginnings for government-run and aided schools.
After the controversy about sex education in schools, Maharashtra’s education minister Vasant Purke rattled teachers on Friday when he announced that fresh recruitment of school teachers, from primary to higher secondary, would be done through a competitive common entrance examination.
This is expected to start with the 2008-09 academic session in a few days, the minister told education officials and teachers’ representatives at a workshop in Nagpur, and later in Amravati, on Saturday.
About 20 per cent of the total vacancies would be henceforth reserved for candidates who have done their HSC and D.Ed from English-medium schools. Most schools don’t recruit an exclusive English teacher anymore. A teacher from a Marathi or Urdu medium school also teaches English as another subject. The government’s decision in this respect is because English yields poor results in the SSC and HSC every year.
The state produces close to 4,000 D.Ed graduates in English every year who go on to teach in English-medium primary schools, mostly privately-run. The education department, however, hires only Marathi-medium D.Ed graduates for its approximately 80,000 schools, mainly outside Mumbai. “Hiring full-time English teachers is a welcome move,” says GG Nandede, deputy director of education, Nagpur division.
Last year, the government found that many Class V students could not write the alphabet, seven years after the government introduced basic oral English in Class I. “If we want quality, we’ll have to get English graduates so you have to reserve jobs for them,” Purke argued. The new policy, to be included in the state’s recruitment rules, will be applicable to corporation-run schools as well.
Purke also said every school has been asked to keep aside one day for “students and teachers to interact and communicate only in English” so as to instil “confidence among students and teachers in the rural areas as well”.
He added: “If you don’t wish to be offended, or your students to suffer in future, imparting English language skills is a must. This will not have an impact on Marathi.” When Purke asked the gathering if “our students can match the spoken English skills of KG students in private schools”, there was complete silence.
Secondary school students will now also have board exams in Class VII to improve their standards by putting them through a quality test, Purke said. “Private and public schools follow the CBSE pattern conduct tests for students every year but in our system, a student gets promoted to every class till he is tested in the SSC for the first time. This must change,” he said.
Updating syllabus
The state board for secondary and higher secondary education is updating its syllabus to bring it at on par with the CBSE and ICSE patterns.
It will do away with English and Mathematics that prove difficult for students and make them optional The board wants to introduce easier versions like ‘functional mathematics’ from the 2008-09 academic session in the Ninth standard.
Those keen on engineering can choose applied mathematics as an option. The move follows a directive to state boards from the NCERT to upgrade the syllabus, in keeping with a global pattern which stress research and practicals. The new syllabus will be introduced from 2010.
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