Teaching the teacher

The key challenge in school education is improving and sustaining quality. Poor student performance is directly linked to poor quality of teaching. The bulk of elementary schoolteachers in India are under-qualified and untrained. If 80 per cent of new schoolteachers are educated in unregulated private teaching shops, the rest are poorly prepared through inadequate pre-service training in public institutions that have outdated curricula.

Teacher-training capacity in educationally challenged states such as Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal is grossly inadequate. In order to meet the demands that the Right to Education Act places on teachers, pre-service education is made an essential requirement for newly recruited teachers by a gazette notification.

This means that additional resources are required to upgrade the professional capacities of close to one million existing under-qualified and untrained teachers and for the pre-service education of one million additional teachers to be recruited. If not attended to, the current situation will continue to drain public resources by attempting to motivate poorly qualified teachers through piecemeal in-service training without addressing the real needs of the classroom.