In a bid to improve efficiency of Government-run schools, Delhi Government has decided to increase the working hours of teachers by half-an-hour. With this decision, the working hours of teachers will get 30 minutes extra to plan their lessons, check notebooks, evaluate their own performance as well as that of their students, prepare teaching aids to made their lessons interesting so on and so forth. More than 15 lakh students will be benefited from the decision. It is noted that Education Act 2009 mandates a minimum of 45 working hour per week for a teacher.
The Directorate of Education (DoE) runs 1007 schools in 707 buildings of which 409 buildings have single shift schools while 298 buildings have double shift schools. As of now these schools caters to 15.5 lakh students and because almost 300 of the school buildings have to accommodate two schools (one in morning and the other in evening), the average time for a shift is 5.30 hours which included an assembly of 25-30 minutes and a recess period of 20 minutes. So the effective teaching time left in the school was only 4.40 hours which was some how divided into eight periods of 30 minutes each.