A file photo shows students at a municipal school at Patamata lanka in Vijayawada

VIJAYAWADA: There will be no Telugu and Urdu medium government schools in Andhra Pradesh from the next academic year as the state government has decided to shift to English medium education. Orders to this effect were issued on Tuesday.

All Telugu and Urdu medium schools will be converted into English medium schools. The move comes in the wake of an expert committee’s recommendation to make English medium mandatory to strengthen government schools.

School education department on Tuesday issued an order according permission to the commissioner of school education to convert all government, MPP, and Zilla Parishad schools and all classes into English medium. English medium will be implemented for classes 1 to 8 from the academic year 2020-21 and classes 9th and 10th from year 2021-22.

However, the commissioner of school education will take appropriate and adequate efforts to implement Telugu or Urdu as a compulsory subject depending on the current medium of instruction in all the schools compulsorily in line with the government orders.

The government directed the school education commissioner to deploy required teachers as per the staffing pattern prescribed by the government from time to time and as per pupil-teacher ratio for single medium schools.

The state government focused on training teachers as per the guidelines of the expert committee. The State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) is directed to take necessary action for designing and development of teacher handbooks, training of teachers in English medium, teaching skills and knowledge, compendium of best classroom practices and other pedagogical material for supporting teachers to be skilled in English medium teaching.

The school education department is directed to take comprehensive action for online assessment of the current English proficiency levels of teachers and design appropriate training programs for utilising English medium teaching skills for teachers. Special English classes will be conducted in summer holidays and expert faculty deployed in the training classes.

A few teachers’ associations welcomed the move of the state government. They requested the government to focus on providing necessary infrastructure like smart classrooms, laptops and study material to handle the English medium classes in an effective way.

