NCTE’s one-year B.Ed, M.Ed plan will dilute teacher training, produce ‘mere technicians’: Experts

NEW DELHI: The National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) is reintroducing the one-year Bachelor of Education (B.Ed) and Master of Education (M.Ed) degrees. If its draft policy is approved, institutions will also be allowed to transition existing two-year B.Ed and M.Ed (full-time) programmes.

Educators see the NCTE draft policy, now placed in public for comment, as a “regressive move” that will completely “dilute” the quality of teacher education and take it back to what it was before 2015, when the two-year B.Ed and M.Ed were introduced.

They became two-year programmes with new regulations in 2014, a reform that’s now being reversed.

NCTE B.Ed, M.Ed plan: What changes

In case of the one-year B.Ed, the two semesters will include school internship, field-based experiences and practice teaching along with academics. The one-year M.Ed includes research dissertation with instructions that the summer should be used for field attachment and practicum – the practical section of the curriculum – and other activities.

The norms propose that the National Testing Agency (NTA) conduct a standardised subject and aptitude test for admission to the one-year B.Ed, M.Ed as well as their existing two-year and part-time versions. However, there is no clarity on whether there will be a separate test like the NCET in case of the four-year Integrated Teacher Education Programme (ITEP) or be part of Common University Entrance Test (CUET) UG and PG.

The draft NCTE (Recognition Norms and Procedure) Regulations, 2025, also has norms for four new specialisations of ITEP – art education, yoga, physical education and Sanskrit.

The ITEP combines a degree in a regular discipline with a teaching qualification for an integrated BA B.Ed, BSc B.Ed or BCom B.Ed programme.

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B.Ed syllabus, subjects

Under the new norms, candidates with a master's degree with at least 50% marks or those with a four-year UG degree in a specialised subject with at least 50% marks will be eligible for admission to one-year B.Ed course.

S Srinivasa Rao, dean, Indira Mahindra School of Education at Mahindra University, Hyderabad, said, “The change seemed to have been triggered with the introduction of ITEP. Those who do the three year programme will go through the two year B.Ed and the ones with four years will go through the one year B.Ed. This seems to have not been thought through well, because I believe that four years of UG may not necessarily offer the number of courses or credit that the two year B.Ed students are offered. The two year B.Ed students will be offered a wide variety of courses which prepares them to become better teachers. By cutting short that preparation to be a teacher, obviously the number of courses in one year will be limited.”

The one-year programme will also allow for stage-specific specialisation – foundational, preparatory, middle, secondary – as per the organisation of schooling after the National Education Policy 2020. Those who complete the course will be eligible for the master’s programme, M.Ed.

The one-year B.Ed can be offered at all institutions with the ITEP.

Existing stand-alone teacher training colleges offering B.Ed and interested in transitioning to the one-year version will be eligible to apply for permission. However, there’s a rider – they must also transform into multidisciplinary higher education institutions by 2028 and run ITEP by 2030.

All institutions running the two year B.Ed will have to adopt the new curriculum. This will mean introducing stage specific specialisation as per the new school structure of 5+3+3+4.

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Why NCTE dropped 1-year B.Ed, M.Ed format

The one-year courses had existed before.

The Supreme Court had constituted the Justice Verma Commission (JVC) to examine teacher education in the country. Following its recommendations, made in 2012, the NCTE had revised the B.Ed and M.Ed courses into two-year programmes.

Rao pointed out that the committee had looked into the time spent on apprenticeship and found that the student teachers spent barely five-six weeks – under two months – in schools for practicum.

“It was felt by the committee that it was too short a time and [that] two years will accommodate five to six months of teacher-student engagement. That would have given students a long-term exposure to classroom situations and made them better teachers,” said Rao, “they would have been able to better understand the classroom environment they would be dealing with. I don’t know how a student with a four-year graduation in physics will become a physics teacher if he/she is not exposed sufficiently to the pedagogy skills, curricula content, the classroom management issues, which the two year B.Ed has sufficiently provided.”

He was previously at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Zakir Hussain Centre for Educational Studies.

A faculty member at a Regional Institute of Education (RIE) echoed Rao’s concerns while noting that the two-year B.Ed was hard won.

“The two-year B.Ed was introduced after a long struggle,” they said. “Since 1996 it was in the pipeline but ultimately came in 2015. Before 2015 also, as an experiment, it was introduced in RIE Mysore. This is actually a dilution and quality will suffer because of this as the one-year BEd will only have some pedagogical component and some context and it will be detrimental.”

The new M.Ed

The one-year M.Ed “is an advanced level course delineated to 40 credits spread over two semesters”, says the NCTE draft policy.

The one academic year will be split into two semesters, including field attachment and research dissertation.

Rao questions, “In the case of one year M.Ed, if they are doing a dissertation, in one year what kind of dissertation will they write? What kind of courses would they do? You are looking at the quality of teacher education but then you are compromising with the quality. By converting it into one-year will leave the problems we had before 2012 just as they were.”

Students who have obtained at least 50% in either version of B.Ed, ITEP or Bachelor of Elementary Education (B.El.Ed) are eligible for M.Ed.

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For Venita Kaul, professor emerita, education, Ambedkar University Delhi, “one year of M.Ed is even more of a problem”.

“That course is supposed to prepare teacher educators,” she explained, “therefore, it needs even more inputs and a much more enriched curriculum for them to be teacher educators. The teaching practice itself needs a lot of time. One year will mean barely nine months to be trained.”

The part-time M.Ed, also a two-year programme but offered to in-service teachers and educational functionaries, will continue in its current form.

Space and time

A key concern is the duration.

“In two years B.Ed you have the space and time to make the programme more grounded in the foundational subjects like understanding the socio cultural economic context of education,” said Poonam Batra, former professor and co-ordinator of the Bachelor of Elementary Education at Delhi University’s Central Institute of Education (CIE). “While in one year, teachers are being prepared as mere technicians who will have a method to teach chemistry, history which is itself not driven by the subject. We are not talking about essentialist knowledge but talking about knowledge which is contextualised. The children, whatever level they are at, need to study the subject in a manner that helps them to understand their own ground realities and resonate with those. That way education becomes meaningful.”

As per the 2021-22 report of All India Survey of Higher Education (AISHE), the latest available, 1.7 million students were enrolled in undergraduate education degrees and 2.72 lakh at the postgraduate level.