‘We need to have a structural reform at the government level,’ says Nagaland Edu Advisor

Our Correspondent
Kohima | July 17

A two-day long state level training programme for District Master Trainers on Mapping of BEACON schools, Tracking of Learning Progress and Nagaland Literacy & Numeracy Fest 2024 commenced at Capital Convention Centre, Kohima under the aegis of Samagra Shiksha Nagaland on July 16. 

Addressing the inaugural session, Nagaland School Education & SCERT Advisor Dr Kekhrielhoulie Yhome stressed on the need to create a system to reform and address the various shortcomings and issues within the department. ‘Today, we are working on a new policy. We will re-work the system,’ he said. ‘We need to have a structural reform at the government level,’ he said.

Dr Yhome informed that the department had introduced an attendance system in four districts and Directorate. “We will start deducting salary,” he said, adding that the department had already got approval from P &AR and it will initiate disciplinary action.

At the districts, the department had created digitally effective dash board. “We are putting a monitoring team for strengthening all these things,” he said. 

During our time, he said, we will see some changes. Today, the initiative, taking up by the department is a huge thing, he said adding that the department is doing the right thing by putting the right foundation.

“The foundation of grooming our society, the foundation of putting education in the right platform is through the early child education,” Dr Yhome said.  

Till March 2024, we have already trained 4697 teachers, he said, adding that the department had trained the officers of social welfare department from 10 districts.

Today, we are not working in isolation; the advisor said adding that the department has been working with other departments as well. We are trying to bring mechanism across all sectors, he said.

Dr Yhome maintained the Government higher secondary schools are doing extremely well in the state.

“If there is a rush for our higher secondary schools, why cannot the same thing apply to our primary, GMS and High schools?” he said. “Our job is to regain the trust of the public,” he told the officers and teachers, adding that the public have lost their faith “on our school system because we are unable to extend what we should be doing. We are not able to rationalize, streamline and reform the system.”

Call for transforming education in foundational stage
In keynote address, Samagra Shiksha state mission director Temsunaro Aier said that the two-day training programme is organised as a follow- up of the five-say training programme conducted in March this year.

Aier said that the State ECCE & FLN team have come up with an innovative plan to map the Exemplar schools for Foundational Stage Education with a brilliant acronym BEACON (Budding ECCE Academy for Children of Nagaland) to promote the best performing schools.

She informed that the state team has developed Assessment Report Card for Class 1-3 and Holistic Report Card (HPC) for Class A & B to track the child’s learning progress. “In this training, you will be learning about the Digitization of these assessments in the Foundational Stage to be on boarded on the Vidya Samiksha Kendra (VSK). With this initiative, the state is moving forward to track individual Child’s Learning progress in the District, Block and School level to ensure that all our children acquire expected grade appropriate competencies,” Aier said.

She informed that Nagaland Literacy & Numeracy Fest 2.0 will be conducted this year too in cycles as a continuation of Nagaland Reading Festival and the Nagaland Literacy & Numeracy Fest conducted during 2022 and 2023 respectively. “It is heartening to see the increasing participation of schools in the Micro Improvement projects. We have seen an increase of project submission during 2022-23 from 1094 projects to 8695 projects during 2023-24,” she informed.

 “While we continue our journey in transforming Education especially in the Foundational Stage, it is vital for us to establish strong linkage between sister departments at the State level and DIETs and EBRCs in the District/Block level to provide optimum academic resource supports and handholding supports to our schools,” Aier said.

This training for the District Master Trainers from the DIETs, District and EBRCs has been organized to train the School Heads and teachers in the block level training scheduled on July 25 and 26 to cover about 5292 Government teachers,” she said. Further, she urged all the District Master Trainers to give their best by rendering their best service in task-oriented mission mode to achieve desired outcome.

The inaugural session was chaired by Kelhikha Kenye, Deputy Mission Director, Samagra Shiksha, Nagaland. Kevileno Angami, Commissioner & Secretary School Education & SCERT, Thavaseelan K, Principal Director, School Education, Kevirale-ü Kerhuo, Director SCERT Nagaland and  Wonthungo Tsopoe, Director School Education also present at the inaugural session.
The training programme will continue till July 17.