IN THE consultative process for the New Education Policy which is going on, an opinion has emerged that the no-detention policy which was implemented to ensure holistic development of students is hampering the performance of students. Therefore, principals and teachers want this policy to be scrapped.

Various surveys and assessments suggesting that a majority of government school students cannot read simple text or solve basic mathematical questions have already shown poor performance of students of classes I-VIII. And going by the Summative Assessment-I results of class IX, exams of which were held last month, the city government schools have continued to perform badly.

Although the schools are yet to officially submit their exam results to the District Education Office, school heads say that the results are almost similar to what was recorded last year, and all of them blame the no-detention policy till class VIII.

Talking about her September exam results, Vibha Thareja, principal of Government Model High School, Sector 38(W), says, “Despite repeated efforts of teachers, our results are not that good at all. The no-detention policy till class VIII has made the children believe that it does not matter if they study or not, they will still be promoted to the next class.”

“Unfortunately, when they take their class IX exams, they get a rude shock to see their red-marked report cards. Our old system was good enough when we used to conduct our local boards in the schools in class V and the performance used to be much better than now,” Thareja adds.

Anujit Kaur, principal of Government Model Senior Secondary School, Sector 16, says, “I believe that students should be detained. The no-detention policy has not done any good to the students. I had a meeting today with my staff and all the teachers complained that the students are faring badly, especially in class IX.”

“The teachers said students did not take studies seriously and then in the Summative Assessment exams held twice, they failed to answer questions. I think the students should be detained directly and we can just write ‘repeat’ in their report cards to make sure we do not hurt them,” she says.

Sudesh Mittal, principal of Government Model High School, Sector 25, insists there cannot be any improvement in the results until the no-detention policy is followed. “Our class IX results after the September exams are almost similar to that of last year. The problem is that students do not even understand questions and end up copying the questions in place of writing answers. I believe that we should make the boards compulsory at least for class VIII to improve the class IX results,” she says.

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