Sibal stresses on increasing students' enrollment in Open Schools

New Delhi, Feb 15 (ANI): Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Kapil Sibal on Monday in a step aimed at enhancing the acceptability of open schooling system, emphasized on the need for increasing students' enrollment in open schools from 1.5 percent to 15 percent.

At the annual meeting of National Consortium for Open Schooling (NCOS) Sibal said, "A national policy will be evolved under which regular schools will embrace distance education. This will make distance schooling more acceptable."

The centre is considering to frame a policy, which would enable regular schools adept the distance education programme.

The National Consortium for Open Schooling should work towards designing a framework of mission and vision to increase the acceptability of open schooling in the country, said Sibal appealing the state governments to implement the open schooling programme so that every child can get benefits of this programme.

He also released the logo and the vision document of NCOS during the programme.

Sibal further said that of the one crore children in the age group of 14-18 years, who currently pursue secondary education, 16 lakh are doing it through the open schooling system.

"This number (16 lakh) is not good enough. It should be increased to about 70-80 lakh by the end of the 11th Five Year plan and should be 1.5 crore by 2020," he added. (ANI)