Tribune News Service

New Delhi, December 19

Seeking to increase the upper and lower age limit of the Right to Education to include preschool and secondary school (up to class 10), UNICEF India chief Louis-Georges Arsenault said he is not in favour of scrapping the no-detention policy. The RTE at present covers children in the age group 6 to 14 years.

“The quality of elementary education is greatly influenced by preschool,” said Arsenault quoting scientific research studies.

“The most important basis of education foundation is early childhood development, preschooling and grade 1 to 3. When you do it right there, your capacity to stay in school and not drop out increases by 2 to 3 times,” he said adding that increasing RTE up to age 16 helps prevent child marriage and child labour.

Advocating continual assessment of primary school students through the year instead of focusing on annual examinations, he said, “We should not have a system which in primary education, if you fail, you have to repeat a year. If you look at Right to Education (RTE) with activity based learning (ABL), it is the opposite. ABL is clustering children in a classroom according to their learning capacity, not the script curriculum which says, you pass, you fail, you pass you fail. We know that’s not what it should be, so we are asking the government not to do it.”