While inadequate coverage is an issue, ensuring equitable standards and basic acceptable quality across public, private and voluntary sectors with a focus on inclusion (particularly with regard to gender, caste, class and children with...
moreWhile inadequate coverage is an issue, ensuring equitable standards and basic acceptable quality across public, private and voluntary sectors with a focus on inclusion (particularly with regard to gender, caste, class and children with special needs) is another major challenge. A good ECCE programme should be essentially designed to provide children a sound foundation for all round development and prepare them for primary schooling, through an environment characterized by creative play spaces, storytelling and making, conversations, music and movement, stimulating and imaginative play materials, specific school readiness activities and other such developmentally appropriate interactions. Instead, it often tends to become a downward extension of the formal primary academic curriculum, which can be detrimental for children. This difference is evident if the public sector and private sector ECCE programmes are compared. In the public and voluntary sectors, the quality of services for children tends to be characterized by a ‘minimalist’ approach in terms of basic amenities and programme content and, more specifically in ICDS, due to over- dependence on a single worker for delivery of all its six services, in addition to other tasks/ surveys she carries out on demand. In the expanding private sector, on the other hand, there is a wide range of provisions, with significant instances of often child- unfriendly and developmentally inappropriate practices. Another issue related to quality in ECCE is that of the absence of continuity in the curriculum or content of ECCE programmes with the Grades 1 and 2 curriculum at the primary stage. The two are not planned in continuation in terms of content or methodology, to ensure a smooth transition for the child.
