2-6 year olds to get emotional push in new education curriculum

HYDERABAD: The long-pending demand of school managements and parents for an official policy on preschool education has finally been met, with the Telangana State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) recently framing an exclusive curriculum for pre-primary classes.
As per the curriculum, teachers will have to adhere to an oral form of learning, in the early stages of pre-school, while activities related to literacy, numeracy and language, in the written form, will be introduced only in the later stages.

“Due to the lack of a fixed pedagogy or guidelines, schools followed their own rules until now. Some of them even tried getting the children acquainted with writing at a young age of two years, when their hands are not even steady to hold a pencil. The new move will, hopefully, address this issue,” said S Ramabrahma, a retired teacher, lauding Telangana State Council of Educational Research and Training’s new curriculum.
Further, on realising that the “transition age from plus 2 to 6 is the most neglected” in the state, the council has proposed to introduce the curriculum in two stages based on the age of the child. “A child who is 3+ old shall be admitted into foundation 1 and 4+ children shall be admitted into foundation 2,” reads the 85-page document, a copy of which is with TOI.
While Telangana State Council of Educational Research and Training has fixed no medium of instruction, it has categorised the curriculum in six major components — personal, social and emotional development; physical development and play; language and communication; understanding the world; expressive arts and design; and early literacy and numeracy.
Welcoming the move, parents said this uniformity in syllabus will make admission process more hasslefree. “Currently, different schools follow different curriculum. This leaves parents in a dilemma while admitting their child as the curriculum plays a vital role in the fee levied by a school – right from Montessori to Waldorf. Uniform curriculum across the state will benefit parents tremendously,” said Naresh Yanamala, a parent, who was among those that raised concerns over lack of policy for pre-school education in Telangana in 2015.
But while devising of a curriculum, at a time when the Telangana school education department has accorded recognition to over 4,000 pre-primary schools for the 2018-19 academic year, comes as a step in the right direction, the continuing lack of assurance about when this would be rolled out, is still a cause for concern.
“We have devised the curriculum in association with the women and child welfare department. However, we are yet to decide the period when the curriculum will be implemented,” confessed Seshu Kumari, director of SCERT.