Kerala to launch its State Curriculum Framework by May 15: SCERT director

NEW DELHI: Kerala’s State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) will be launching the draft State Curriculum Framework, or SCF by May 15, Jayaprakash RK, SCERT director said on Wednesday.

Soon after the launch, the state plans to begin the process of preparing new textbooks, he added. “The public and student consultations have been concluded successfully. We will be releasing our SCF by May 15 and soon after that we will start writing books,” he told Careers360. The new curriculum will replace the existing document followed since 2009.

The SCERT also prescribes textbooks for government schools in Kerala. The council has directed schools to teach deleted sections in NCERT books in Class 11 and 12.

The SCERT Kerala will also put the 26 position papers on various themes in the public domain before the release of SCF. Themes like philosophy of education, curriculum and pedagogy, science education, social sciences, environment education, inclusive education, education based on gender justice among others will be covered in these 26 position papers. These position papers will be the foundation on which the new books and syllabi will be designed.

The state curriculum framework, like the National Curriculum Framework, will set a structure defining what students should learn in state schools and guide syllabus and textbook design and teaching practices.

The education department of Kerala has concluded the state-wide consultations, including school-level and class-level discussions. The department had framed guidelines for these discussions and for collecting feedback from students, teachers and parents in November last year.

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‘Not based on NCF’

While the National Curriculum Framework for foundational level has been finalised, a pre-draft of the NCF for school education was launched earlier this month. Along with working on the NCF, Kerala and other states were directed by the union government to develop state-level curricula in tune with the National Education Policy 2020. The Kerala curriculum, however, has been developed “independent” of the NCF, the director said.

“The NCERT has released the first draft and they have sought suggestions from stakeholders and the public for revising. We have not looked at it to prepare our state curriculum framework. We have prepared it on our own. Education is a part of the concurrent list so we do not have to bother about [NCF],” said Jayaprakash.

Like the union government, each state is also required to design four revised curricula on early childhood care education, school education, adult education and teachers’ education. The centre had asked SCERTs to make recommendations that can be incorporated in the new NCF.

“The initial plan was to take suggestions from states [for the NCF] on the matter. However, they [Centre] have not taken suggestions from our SCF. They have not even published the 26 position papers even though they have a committee for it. In our federal setup, states have their own powers to prepare their own curriculum. We did not wait on papers from the centre to prepare Kerala’s SCF,” he added.