Teacher Training Colleges Face Clampdown: New Regulations To Raise Standards

The teacher training trade faces a clampdown with almost 3,000 errant institutions likely to be barred from admitting fresh students from the next academic year.

The National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) has proposed new regulations in order to control the mushrooming of poor quality institutions and bring about transparency in teacher training.

“We have (given) an approval for 18,000-19,000 courses running in around 15,000 institutions. The gap (those who have not submitted the baseline information) is around 3,000-4,000 colleges. We are giving time till 30 June and those who will not submit, cannot admit,” said NCTE chairman A Santhosh Mathew.

The NCTE plan:

1. Revamp of the grading system with less emphasis on physical assets. Now on, physical assets will get just 10 per cent weightage, 20 per cent weight will go to academic assets, 30 per cent to teacher transactions and 40 per cent to students' learning outcome.

2. In order to raise the learning outcome, NCTE will conduct a proctored test under which aspiring teachers will be videographed during practical classes. “We shall run Big Data to score their performance,” Mathew said.

3. NCTE is also working to rank teacher education colleges, more than two-thirds of which are run privately. As a first step, it will unveil top 100 institutions by January 2018 and rankings over the next 12 months thereafter.