Educational news about Personality development, career guidance, Leadership Skills and more in Edubilla.com ...

The state education department shot off letters to education officers Thursday to ensure that quality assessment cells are formed at the school, cluster, taluka and district levels to assess teachers as well as skills of students on a regular basis and to devise new programmes to improve quality of education.

The education department had recently faced a lot of criticism over the goof-ups and delays in conducting the baseline tests to gauge the basic level of understanding of students and the quality of teaching.The data of the baseline tests will be available in the next 15 days, and according to it, students will be graded and corrective measures will be taken up immediately. 

The baseline or competency tests are conducted for all students between STD II to STD VIII to test the basic competency of students to qualify for a class. This was introduced to assess quality of education after the no-fail policy up to STD VIII was launched a few years back, leading to concerns over dropping quality of teaching and learning. 

The test has been designed by State Council for Education, Research and Training, but these are to be conducted at the school level and once assessed, every student is to be graded and the data uploaded into SARAL (Systematic Administrative Reforms for Achieving Learning by Students) database.

In the letters, Ramchandra Jadhav, deputy director of education (Pune), has instructed all district and block divisional officers to ensure that the quality assessment cells are formed within 2 days and the list of members notified to the office. 

“At the state level, too, we have formed a committee which is being headed by me. Similarly, these committees need to be formed at every level, including school level. Its main job is to monitor the education graph of students through various assessment tests carried out by the state education department such as the baseline survey or the results of surveys and reports by NGOs and such parties nominated by the government. 

The cells will also monitor the quality of teaching by tracking the qualifications and training of teachers. The cell is expected to implement the pilot projects related to quality improvement as well as suggest need for specialised training programmes and projects,” said Jadhav. He added that the quality assessment cell members would meet regularly and the deputy directors of education would submit a quarterly report of the working of the cells to the state education department.