The Bill amends the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE), 2009 to extend the deadline for teachers to acquire the prescribed minimum qualifications for appointment.
Why this amendment was needed?
- The RTE Act, 2009 envisages free and compulsory elementary education to every child in the age group of 6-14 years.
- The section 23(2) of the Act specifies that all teachers at elementary level at commencement of this law if did not possess minimum qualifications under it need to acquire these within a period of five years i.e. by March 2015.
- However, several state governments have reported that 11.00 lakh teachers at the elementary level are still untrained out of a total number of 66.41 lakh teachers.
What will be the benefit of this amendment?
- The amendments to RTE Act, 2009 will enable the in-service untrained elementary teachers to complete their training and ensure that all teachers at the elementary level have certain minimum standard of qualifications.
- It will ensure that all teachers attain minimum qualifications as considered necessary to maintain the standard of teaching quality.
- It will ultimately result in improvement in overall quality of teachers, teaching processes and learning outcomes of children.
- It will reinforce Government’s emphasis on improvement of quality of elementary education.
- Bill offers untrained teachers teaching in schools time till March 31, 2019, to acquire B.El. Ed (Bachelor of Elementary Education) or D. El. Ed. (Diploma in Elementary Education) qualifications to hold their jobs as teachers.
Excellent steps to ensure the recruitment of quality teachers. Many teachers of elementary school don’t even know the spelling of ‘Apple’! They surely need some education themselves!