Quality Education (SSA)

Enhancing Quality and Innovation

Our Vision:

The Department of School Education & Literacy aims to provide education of equitable quality to all children in the state. The department’s vision is to create an education system by 2030 that enables every human being for lifelong learning from her or his early days. Following are the key elements of our vision synchronized with the Sustainable Development Goals related to Education.

  • Every child in 3-6 year age group is provided inclusive and equitable quality pre-school educationin partnership with the Department of Women and Child Development.
  • Every child in 6-10 year age group is provided inclusive and equitable quality primary education
  • Every child in 11-14 year age group is provided inclusive and equitable quality upper primary education
  • Every child in 15-18 year age group is provided inclusive and equitable quality upper secondary education
  • Every person, both men and women, are enabled to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture's contribution to sustainable development in partnership with Department of Women and Child Development and Labour Employment & Training..
  • Jharkhand state sets up a robust teacher education system that supplies qualified teachers, who will facilitate the desired learning processes to achieve the goal of life-long learning for every person in our society.

Present Status:

Elementary Education: Elementary Education comprising, primary and upper primary education, forms the foundation of the education pyramid. To strengthen this foundation and to achieve the goal of universal access to quality education across the state has initiated several measures which are discussed below. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 is operational in the state since 1st April, 2010. This has contributed significantly to the school access, enrolment, teacher availability and quality education through various interventions. The ‘National Programme of Mid-Day Meal (MDM)’ in Schools also has contributed to children’s school enrolment, attendance and retention. The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) is being implemented to achieve the goals of universal access and retention, bridging of gender and social gaps in enrolment levels and enhancement of learning levels of all children,through provision of community-owned quality education in a mission mode.Setting up Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas (KGBVs) in 203 blocks and Jharkhand Balika Avashiya Vidyalayas (JBAV) residential schools in the other 57 blocks has a visible contribution to girls’ education, mostly for girls from vulnerable backgrounds.

Quality Education: We have improved significantly in terms of school access and children’s enrolment in schools. At present improvement in quality of education is the topmost priority of the department. For this, we have systematically planned so that each child gets continuous support from early years to acquire the foundational knowledge and skills from pre-primary and early primary stage. For this we are collaborating with the Department of Women and Child Development for quality pre-school education to children in 3-6 year age group. Immediately after this, children enter the primary classes, where we emphasize on children’s school readiness and acquisition of early grade reading skills, which provide a sound foundation for their interest in learning and continuous learning. At this stage, children acquire the knowledge and skills related to basic literacy and numeracy. We have developed well organized early grade learning programmes for primary level. For multilingual context, where children struggle to learn because of language disadvantages, we have developed textbooks in various tribal and regional languages and are in the process of initiating a mother tongue based multilingual education (MTB-MLE) programme.

With the foundational skills children get ready for continuous learning with interest. For this we have designed contextual textbooks based on learning theories for primary classes to promote activity based learning. We train our teachers annually how to focus on school readiness, early grade learning skills and activity based learning to enable them facilitate appropriate teaching learning processes.

We have also designed strategies for strengthening the other factors which contribute to children’s quality education: student attendance, participation in learning activities and learning assessment. We have designed appropriate strategies to improve these components which can contribute to their learning processes in an integrated manner.

To move towards the SDGs in a systematic and collaborative manner, we have initiated inter-departmental consultations to look at our role, responsibilities and progress made with to the SDG goals. This interdepartmental dialogue and planning has enabled us to look at life long education/learning in an integrated manner starting from every child’s early years.

Our State has planned to reduce under/over age enrolment in schools. Duplication of enrolment will also be checked through Aadhar based enrolment and introduction of biometric attendance system in all schools. Age specific enrolment will be considered in specific classes. Hence GER and NER will be around 100% after 2024.

Our Major Challenges:

Being a relatively new state, Jharkhand has certain challenges due to shortage of adequate resource and research institutes and structures, which affects the quality and processes of various initiatives. We are in the process of strengthening the structures and missing gaps to keep Jharkhand on the track of contemporary educational development on priority basis.

Some of the key challenges include the following.

  1. Shortage of academic institutes:We do not have some of the full-fledged key academic resource and research centers such as SCERT and Textbook Bureau at state level and DIETs, BIETs and other Teacher Education Institutes at district and sub-district level. We are in the process of strengthening these. Recently we have undertaken a stocking of the existing DIETs and have designed a plan of action to revamp and restructure the teacher education programme in the state.
  2. Shortage of full-fledged Teacher education Institutes :Due to poor status ofteacher education institutes our pre-service teacher education and in-service teacher education programmes through existing teacher education institutes requires a lot of improvisation. We need both financial and academic support from the best of resource agencies in the nation. We have initiated processes for developing our DIETs as Centers of Excellence in different subject areas.
  3. Issues of children from vulnerable backgrounds:We also face challenges due to left wing extremism (LWE) and other social issues such as early child marriage, child trafficking, child labour, migration of families, etc. At present these issues are being addressed on priority basis by designing issue specific strategies to enable children from vulnerable backgrounds manage to come to nearby schools and continue their studies.

Our major strategies:

To address above mentioned challenges, we have designed our strategies in the following key areas:

  • Human resources for the schools and teacher education institutes;
  • Quality education at all levels;
  • Issue based strategies for girls, tribal and other children;
  • Total quality monitoring at all levels.