LEAD on National Education Policy completing 1 year

“The National Education Policy 2020 spelt out education as being fundamental to human development and the high quality learning opportunities that the nation must provide to its young minds to prepare them for the future. The policy is a forward looking document and heralds the future where learning is fun, engaging and results in real world application. 

While there was a lot planned for K-12 students, the implementation is happening gradually. Right from simplification of the existing school-book content which is heavy on text, to making classroom lessons more interactive and complementing it with audio-visual content, all these guidelines are yet to see full scale implementation. Newer areas like coding, financial literacy and artificial intelligence that are critical to future success of students need to become a part of the curriculum in a phased-wise manner.

The pandemic and prolonged school closure has made implementation even more difficult for schools, who are currently struggling to provide continued learning to students. As a result, it is difficult to gauge the benefit students have had in this one year of NEP, just the way it is hard to read the wind quality in the middle of a storm. We should wait for the storm of Covid to settle down and then assess its implementation. 

As an EdTech in K-12 segment, LEAD has empowered more than 2000 schools today to provide uninterrupted learning with interactive online learning and multi modal delivery of curriculum. With an objective to transform the old computer science curriculum, we were the first to introduce CCS in schools. This was even before the NEP guidelines were put in place to make Coding a part of students' core curriculum. We took a step ahead by recently introducing India's first ever Coding program that can be learnt over a mobile phone. Despite the pandemic, all LEAD Powered Schools in the smallest of cities and towns have been able to deliver quality learning to students – the kind envisioned in our NEP. 

At the onset of the second year of NEP and with schools gradually re-opening across the country, it’s time for all of us to shift gears from crisis-management mode towards future-building mode. I am optimistic that as opposed to previous attempts, equal effort will be taken for execution as what was put in designing and announcing the NEP guidelines.”