New Delhi: Parliament has given approval for the teachers’ education council bill in order to create a centralized national body to regulate teachers. Many educationalists are quite convinced about a centralized organization maintaining the same standards of learning across the country while some are doubtful about the practicality of the legislation.
As per the sources, the bill was passed by Rajya Sabha on August 25 and has recently been approved by Lok Sabha. In order to become a law, it will now be presented to the President Pratbha Patil for her consent. According to the law, under the National Council of Teachers Education (Amendment) Bill 2010, the power of deciding a teacher's qualification will again be given to the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE).
NCTE was established in 1995 to regulate schools and for setting qualification standards for teachers. But in 2008, as an implementation of Supreme Court judgement, it was reformed as a training body for teachers, which gave the task of determining the quality of teachers to the respective individual states.
Last year, the bill was nominated in parliament and sent to a parliamentary standing committee. However, the amendment now reinstates the control of NCTE, which gives it the power to govern and set guidelines for teachers' appointment in all schools.
Sources said that the latest provisions of the newly passed bill will not only be applied to teachers in colleges as well as schools (recognized by the centre and the state) but will also be pertinent to schools providing pre-primary, primary, upper-primary, secondary, and intermediate education.
While discussing about the new reformed bill, Anita Rampal, Head of the Department of Education, Delhi University, said that this legislation should help bring equivalence of standards across states - for determining the quality of teachers and their qualifications as directed by the Right to Education Act (RTE).
