The recent annual State of the Education Report by UNESCO spotlights the poor student-teacher ratio in India. Currently, the country is facing a shortage of over one million teachers and the shortage is likely to grow further. The coming up of the report has ignited debates over teacher shortage and early childhood education problems in India.
NEP 2020 has given due importance to Early Childhood Children Education (ECCE), but with 32 students for over one teacher in Primary school (HRD Ministry), 35% of teachers with no contracts, low salaries and no health leaves, the NEP 2020 vision seems like a distant dream. Another report by NITI Aayog earlier this year states that a single teacher may handle 100+ students in rural areas as a result of the shortage of trained teachers and the causes underlying this collective failure are complex and varied.
To improve the foundational stage of a child’s development, emphasis on accessible education and investing in quality teaching is the first step. School Children’s Online and Offline Learning Survey (SCHOOL) states that due to no proper training or guidelines in Jharkhand, online education for children was difficult to carry out. Even in states such as Maharashtra and Karnataka, the survey revealed that online classes for ECCE show no difference.
Here are two major things to focus on teacher shortage and training:
- Provide an updated curriculum for teachers’ training across Anganwadi and government schools.
- Focus on the emotional and mental health of preschool educators in training. Early Childhood Educators are responsible for nurturing and educating the next generation. They must be in a strong position to identify and support issues among young children under their care.
To work towards the empowerment of teachers and deal with a teacher shortage, a few initiatives by the government and EdTech companies are an inspiration to start from.
In Sitapur and Chitrakoot, Uttar Pradesh Square Panda India signed up to conduct Educator Empowerment Program for primary grade teachers in government schools. During this 1.5 months of training, the focus was laid on ECCE, Numeracy, Literacy, English Proficiency, Classroom Management and ICT. Results show that the training resulted in 47.83% improvement in teaching methodology, 44.38% improvement in classroom management, and a 43% improvement in ECCE.
The government of India recently launched the NISHTHA teachers’ training programme for NIPUN Bharat that focuses on teacher’s training for early childhood education. It envisages making the experience of learning at the foundational stage holistic, inclusive and engaging.
Regarding the shortage of teachers, Ashish Jhalani, MD, Square Panda said, “According to the data released by the Education Ministry in 2015-16, 1.1 million of the 6.6 million teachers employed at the elementary level were untrained. This situation was only exacerbated by the pandemic. Deep-rooted problems such as lack of exposure to necessary teaching tools and engaging learning strategies mean learning has been disrupted like never before. We view these challenges through a multi-stakeholder lens and focus to enable holistic empowerment and transformation for teachers.”