In the National Education Policy, the school structure has been changed from 10+2 scheme to 5+3+3+4 format consisting of four stages of school level education. This implies that universal school education is now from pre-primary to secondary education level.
Thus the pre-school has been made a part of formal education in the government sector too
and universal compulsory education now will be implemented for children in the age group 3 to 18 years.
Four-Stage School Education
The school education structure will now have 4 stages as follows.
· The foundational stage (Grades from preschool to 1&2; 3-8 years): Total five years consisting of three years of Anganwadi/pre-school and two years in primary school in Grades 1-2 with emphasis on a flexibility through multi-level activity-based learning with mother tongue as medium of instruction
· The Preparatory Stage (Grades 3-5; 8-11 years): integrated experiential learning across the subjects such as mathematics, sciences, arts, social sciences, and humanities.
· The Middle stage (Grades 6-8; 11-14 years): Subject-oriented or disciplinary approach and vocational education for holistic development with curricular deliver pedagogical soundness.
· The Secondary stage (Grades 9-12; 14-18 years): Multi-disciplinary flexibility and vocational courses with emphasis on higher order thinking skills along with option to exit at grade 10 and re-enter at a later stage in grade 11.
Other school education features:
The schools can exercise curricular delivery for each of the four stages with annual, semester or any other system through shorter modules.
The content in each subject to be reduced by one-third to restrict it to core content to create space for higher order thinking skills including critical thinking. Reduction in curriculum also provides scope for 'more holistic, inquiry-based, discovery-based, discussion-based, and analysis-based learning' as per the policy.
In respect of mathematics and computational thinking, there will be emphasis with coding to be introduced in Middle Stage.
Vocational education will include internships from grade 6 onward to facilitate learning of new skills.
The assessment system will be formative and comprehensive to show the learning outcome along performance that would describe shortfalls and corrective measures undertaken.
However, the school principals and teachers would require re-orientation and skills training for proper implementation of the policy and carry out some innovation to make use of scope and flexibility to act at the school levels.
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