AMN / NEW DELHI
UNION Education Minister Dr Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank today said, keeping the COVID-19 pandemic in mind and after various consultations, the Government has decided that board exams will not be held in February. He said, exact dates will be announced soon.
Mr Pokhriyal said this while virtually interacting with teachers across the country on upcoming competitive and board exams. The Minister said, he has received a lot of requests from various students and teachers to postpone CBSE board exams for Class 10 and 12. He said, being a student centric government, it has always worked in the interest of the students.
Regarding a suggestion on providing vocational education in class IX, Mr Pokhriyal said that there are approximately 8,583 CBSE schools that offer vocational education. He informed that over 2 lakh 80 thousand secondary schools, nearly 40 thousand colleges and more than 1 thousand universities are expected to provide vocational education with internship after the implementation of NEP 2020.
Responding to suggestions that teachers should be given sufficient training regarding the implementation of Competency Based Education in schools, Mr Pokhriyal informed that the Ministry of education has implemented NISHTHA programme, which is an online capacity building programme for all 42 lakh elementary school teachers and school heads of the country. This programme was conducted face to face before the pandemic. However, in its wake, this programme was contextualised to the needs of teaching and learning during the pandemic and made 100 per cent online.
The Minister also informed that CBSE, KVS and JNV undertook a massive exercise to build online teaching capacities of their teachers as soon as the lockdown started. In the process, CBSE has trained 4,80,000 teachers, KVS trained 15,855 and JNV trained 9,085 teachers all over India.
Training was also imparted by NVS to teachers regarding online assessment. The new National Curriculum Framework for School Education has also been initiated and NCERT will be expected to make changes in the textbooks in accordance with the new NCF. Areas, such as creative thinking, life skills, Indian ethos, art and integration, need to be integrated.
Mr Pokhriyal said that due to the efforts made by the teachers, the online education system of the country has proved successful.