Classroom Challenge Now Is To Deliver Quality !

New Delhi, June 26 (UNI) With the process to enrol India's 200 million 6-to-14-year-olds well underway, a key challenge is ''quality'' basic education, a senior government official acknowledged today.

Ensuring universal access to quality basic education is a key challenge the country faces, Human Resource Development Ministry Secretary Champak Chatterji told an international conference in New Delhi.

Chatterji, who looks after School Education and Literacy, was inaugurating an International Conference: Enhancing the Quality of School Education sponsored by the Aga Khan Foundation - India.

The session was addressed by AKFI chairman Abad Ahmad and Prof Stephen Anderson of Ontario Institute for Studies in Education from Toronto University.

In his keynote address, Prof Anderson said that most educators ''are quite comfortable'' with twenty per cent kids excelling, an equal proportion failing, while the rest get through.

''This kind of thinking leads people to accepting failure as normal,'' he said, and recounted how an American educator not content with such an outcome went on to study why some students were failing.

The key, Prof anderson said, was to refuse to settle for ''adequate'' performance as the end point for quality.

The three day event, part of a series on Programme for Enrichment of School Level Education, will focus on aspects of achieving quality education and sharing experiences gained in areas as wide apart as Ladakh and Chennai or Bangladesh and Sudan.

Chatterji saw burgeoning school enrolment figures as certainly encouraging as it indicated that most children are now in elementary schools.

But he said the fundamental issue was whether they were also learning and acquiring age and grade appropriate competencies in a timely manner.

''What would it take to transform our schools into inclusive learning spaces that respect all children and facilitate understanding and comprehension rather than rote memorisation?'' Stressing ''community empowerment'' for ownership and management of schools, Chatterji suggested it in a way held the key to improvement in Indian public school system.

He advocated moving away from hierarchical systems of official accountability towards 'social accountability'-- making service providers answerable to the community for the quality of schools and educational outcomes.

Noting that the discourse on elementary education was now permeated by a clear outcome orientation, Chatterji called it a welcome and decisive shift.

He said such inputs as additional teachers, training programmes or textbooks must translate into tangible outcomes reflecting improvement in the quality of classrooms and pedagogic practices.

He suggested the need for ''deep systemic reforms'' to tackle such issues as teacher qualifications, service conditions and placements as well as ''squarely'' addressing systemic accountability problems for educational outcomes.

Chatterji said the Ministry's flagship elementary education universalisation programme-- Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan-- was trying to engage with States to address these issues.

He said quality of classrooms also depended on the nature of the curriculum, syllabi and textbooks and the content and process of education needs to be made more relevant to the immediate context of the learner.

UNI