The Lok Sabha has passed The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (Amendment) Bill, 2017.
The Bill amends the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE), 2009 to extend the deadline for teachers to acquire the prescribed minimum qualifications for appointment.
Through the amending measure inadequately qualified teachers as on March 31, 2015, working after enactment of the RTE Act, 2009 are being given last chance to acquire minimum qualifications within a period of four years i.e. by March 31, 2019 to hold their jobs as teachers.
The amendments to RTE Act, 2009 will enable the in-service untrained elementary teachers to complete their training and ensure that all teachers at the elementary level have certain minimum standard of qualifications.
It will ensure that all teachers attain minimum qualifications as considered necessary to maintain the standard of teaching quality.
It will ultimately result in improvement in overall quality of teachers, teaching processes and learning outcomes of children.
It will reinforce Government’s emphasis on improvement of quality of elementary education.
The RTE Act, 2009 envisages free and compulsory elementary education to every child in the age group of 6-14 years.
The section 23(2) of the Act specifies that all teachers at elementary level at commencement of this law if did not possess minimum qualifications under it need to acquire these within a period of five years i.e. by March 2015.
However, several state governments have reported that 11.00 lakh teachers at the elementary level are still untrained out of a total number of 66.41 lakh teachers.
