Week-long Delhi Education Conference concludes

NEW DELHI: Political will leading to educational reforms, building inclusive administrative tools to support teacher training and students' learning moving away from "heavy content-based syllabi" to a reduced, interactive curriculum were among the suggestions put forward during the Delhi Education Conference that concluded here on Sunday.

For improving teacher-training methods, suggestions such as setting up a cadre of specialist teachers, collaborative professional development and engaging with parents at a deeper level were made. Adopting creative teaching practices from countries such as Canada, Japan and Finland to build more on collaborative lesson-planning, providing training and autonomy to teachers were some of the crucial interventions discussed.

"Our focus now will be to further bridge this gap between the school management committees (SMCs) and parents by increasing parent participation. But at the same time, the ownership that parents have showcased in the past few years has been a positive change for us," Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said.

He said it is important to bring the students, who end up dropping out of schools, back into the system. "Struggling children leave the system to pick up jobs outside. We need to figure out how skilling can come into play and how we can provide support to them," Sisodia said.

The closing ceremony reflected back on the key takeaways from the week-long conference that saw the participation of 22 education experts from India and seven other countries -- the UK, the USA, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Singapore and Canada.

The conference started on January 11 with an independent report of the Boston Consulting Group on Delhi's educational reforms from 2015 to 2020. Following this, virtual panel discussions were held every day for the next five days. A study on "Engagement with parents: SMCs Post COVID" was presented to deliberate on the key initiatives on the way forward for Delhi government schools.

"The study surveyed around 50 Delhi government schools and around 1,407 parents. The few key suggestions from the 2017 study that emerged -- attempt to bring SMCs closer to the average parent by increasing awareness and increase SMC representation along socioeconomic lines," an official statement said.

"Another study, 'Re-imagining the classrooms: The Delhi Education Revolution', by the Centre for Policy Research was presented, in which 100 schools, 3,000 classrooms and 60 teacher trainings were observed in 2016-17. It also highlighted the challenges that lie ahead -- assessment system, linking training process to classroom learning and integrating bureaucracy," it added.

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