Early childhood care education to be included in National Curriculum Framework

For the first time in the country, the Union government is including Early Childhood Care Education (ECCE) and Adult Education in the National Curriculum Framework (NCF). The Mandate released for NCF in Bengaluru on Friday included ECCE and Adult Education.

Union Minister for Education Dharmendra Pradhan, who spoke on the occasion, explained that the curriculum framework for early childhood education will be ready in a few months and the syllabus for the children will be designed at the state level.

He requested the committee headed by Prof K Kasturirangan for framing NCF to give recommendations on adult education.

Anita Karwal, Secretary, School Education and Literacy, Government of India said, “The NCF will include ECCE covering the age group zero to eight years. We are including zero in this group to provide guidelines for parents to increase the cognitive ability of kids as neuron cells stimulate at that
age.”

“For the first time the Education department is designing a curriculum framework for ECCE. This is mainly to achieve foundational literacy and numeracy by grade 3,” Karwal explained.

Explaining the mandate, Prof Kasturirangan said that this is an important milestone in defining the school education of the future. “This is the first of a mini curriculum, which will in a sense define the more detailed aspects of curricular structure. We wanted to do this for the school first and the next level will be teachers,” he said.

Dharmendra Pradhan went tough on the way teacher education is provided in Karnataka. Giving an example of how students of Odisha come to Karnataka to study BEd, the minister advised Karnataka primary and higher education minister to look into it seriously.

“I am taking a hard path on this, the Karnataka government has to do something on regulating teacher education,” he said.

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