Quality of education at the foundational and the next levels depends on the quality of teachers. What is being done in this regard?
Competence of teachers and their motivation is crucial for improving the quality. Several initiatives are being taken for addressing teacher shortages, shortages of secondary school teachers in mathematics, science and languages, improving the quality of pre-service teachers and in-service teachers professional development, enhancing the status of teaching as a profession, improving teachers’ motivation and their accountability for ensuring learning outcomes, and improving the quality of teacher educators. Focus is on using technology to have teachers trained by the best educators through the internet. There is also a proposal to introduce institutions like the Academic Staff Colleges in Universities as they exist for college lecturers. As the TSR Subramanian committee recommended, we need to create an autonomous teacher recruitment board and set up an independent mechanism for teacher recruitment. Teacher eligibility test (TET) is a good start. This will ensure a good quality pool.
