PANAJI
Chief Minister Pramod Sawant on Friday announced that National Education Policy (NEP) will be implemented for Class IX from the upcoming academic year slated to commence in June itself.
Sawant who chaired a meeting of top officials of the Education Department to review preparedness of schools for the measure, said that three new subjects will be introduced in the IX standard as per the NEP -- vocational studies, interdisciplinary subject and art.
The actual teaching in these subjects, however, will commence only from August onwards while teachers in the meantime will be imparted adequate training, he said, adding that recruitment of 180 more teachers will also be fast tracked.
Sawant made the remarks to the media after emerging from the review meeting of the Education Department called to review the preparedness of High Schools in Goa to adopt the NEP.
He however refrained from going into the details of either the NEP implementation plan or of the deliberations held during the Friday review meeting.
Apart from Sawant who chaired it, others who attended the review meeting, included Education Secretary, Prasad Lolayekar, IAS, DoE Shailesh Zingde, State Council for Educational Research and Training (SCERT) Director Megha Shetgaonkar, Goa Board chairman, Baghirath Shetye, Dr S Ghadi and Deputy Director (Education) Manoj Sawaikar.
Members of the steering committee setup by the government for NEP implementation -- Shripad Patnekar, former Board chairman G R Rebello and Anil Samant -- also partook in the meeting as was Rupesh Sawant, the NEP implementation co-ordinator.
The NEP was announced by the Central government back in 2020 to universalise school education up to Class XII in the country and Goa was one of the first States to accept and adopt it.
However, implementation of the policy in Goa commenced only at the beginning of the last academic year (2023-24) and that too restricted to the pre-primary level.
At the time in June last year, Sawant, who also holds the education portfolio, had announced that the NEP would be implemented progressively for the primary and the higher classes progressively to maintain continuity.
School managements, administrators, academics and the teaching community meanwhile are apprehensive of the teething problems that may come up over this abrupt implementation of the NEP for higher classes.
A top official of a education society which manages high schools told The Goan that the hurry in which it is being imposed on the school system is cause of some discomfort especially with some infrastructural upgrade which may be required.
He however hastened to add that the formal NEP notification and associated circulars from the education department will have to be perused and the finer points examined before making any official comments or reactions to the government decision.
