Haryana Government will launch a new organisation structure for the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) at Gurgaon.
An official spokesman said that the new structure would serve as key academic body of the State. This organisation would be re-designed as part of a broader, State-wide ‘Quality Improvement Programme’ (QIP) with support from the Boston Consulting Group. The end objective of the programme would be improving the learning levels of students in the 15,000 Government schools of the State enrolling 26 lakh students and one lakh teachers.
Additional Chief Secretary, School Education, Surina Rajan will launch the new organisation structure of SCERT on June 23.
Explaining the need for organisational re-design, the spokesperson said that the QIP was a one-of-its-kind large scale transformation program because of its comprehensive approach to school transformation. It not just addresses the school and classroom level challenges but also systemic issues such as organisational effectiveness and accountability. “These organisational changes are imperative to the success and scalability of all the other initiatives of the State. Starting with SCERT, all institutions of the department would be revamped to support the quality and scale challenge. Progressively, the Directorates will also be restructured to get aligned to the learning quality paradigm”, he added.
The spokesperson said that SCERT organisation structure would be revised to ensure that roles related to quality of education and related functions are grouped together into Centres of functional excellence.
In the new structure, three Centres of Excellence would be constituted — Centre for Curriculum and Pedagogy, Centre for Professional Development and Centre for Research and Testing. In addition, personnel with relevant expertise in ‘primary education’- that faces deep challenges like lack of basic literacy and numeracy — would be included in various departments which were earlier missing. Recommendations of the Justice Verma Commission of Teacher Education have been taken into account and the new structure would be largely in line with those.
He said that SCERT would now also be given greater autonomy with respect to three key functional areas - Planning and Management, Human Resources, and Finance and Budgeting. This would enable more time efficient decision making when implementing key academic activities within the State.