Chennai: The Union Cabinet approved Wednesday the National Education Policy 2020. This is the first education policy of the 21st century and replaces the thirty-four-year-old National Policy on Education (NPE), 1986.
It envisages a single regulator – HECI- for higher education institutions across the country. The Higher Education Council of India (HECI) would have multiple verticals to fulfill various roles.
The first vertical of HECI will be the National Higher Education Regulatory Council (NHERC). It will function as the common, single point regulator for the higher education sector including teacher education. It would, however, exclude medical and legal education.
The second vertical of HECI will, be a ‘meta-accrediting body’, called the National Accreditation Council (NAC). Accreditation of institutions will be based primarily on basic norms, public self-disclosure, good governance, and outcomes, and it will be carried out by an independent ecosystem of accrediting institutions supervised and overseen by NAC.
The third vertical of HECI will be the Higher Education Grants Council (HEGC), which will carry out funding and financing of colleges and varsities.
The fourth vertical of HECI will be the General Education Council (GEC), which will frame expected learning outcomes for higher education programmes, also referred to as ‘graduate attributes’. A National Higher Education Qualification Framework (NHEQF) will be formulated by the GEC.
The new policy aims for the Universalization of Education from pre-school to secondary level with 100 per cent GER in school education by 2030, according to a government statement.
Infrastructure support, innovative education centres to bring back dropouts into the mainstream, tracking of students and their learning levels, facilitating multiple pathways to learning involving both formal and non-formal education modes, association of counselors or well-trained social workers with schools, open learning for classes 3,5 and 8 through NIOS and State Open Schools, secondary education programs equivalent to Grades 10 and 12, vocational courses, adult literacy and life-enrichment programs are some of the proposed ways for achieving this.