Educational Provisions for Out-of-School Children through Open Schooling

1. Recommendations of NEP 2020 for bringing Out of School children to schools

NEP 2020 has laid emphasis on bringing the out-of-school children to the mainstream education. The specific recommendations are as follows-

Providing effective and sufficient infrastructure
Alternative and innovative education centres to be put in place to ensure that children of SEDGs are brought back into mainstream education.
Carefully tracking students, as well as their learning levels
Deployment of teachers with knowledge of the local language to areas with high dropout rates
Overhauling the curriculum to make it more engaging and useful.
To facilitate learning for all students, with special emphasis on Socio-Economically Disadvantaged Groups (SEDGs), the scope of school education will be broadened to facilitate multiple pathways to learning involving both formal and non-formal education modes.
Strengthening ODL Programmes by the NIOS and SOSs for meeting the learning needs of young people in India who are not able to attend a physical school.
Expansion of vocational education courses/programmes; and adult literacy and life-enrichment programmes.
Involvement of community and alumni in volunteer efforts for enhancing learning by providing at schools

Implementation of the Programme

The NIOS shall work in conjunction with the State Education Departments in every State/UT in the following manner-

MoU will be signed with the State/UT to bring back out-of-school children from the formal education system in the fold of NIOOS for continuing education.
Identified Out of school children from every state and UT shall be registered in NIOS in the age appropriate level of schooling like grade 3,5,8,10 and 12. The process shall be as follows-
The registration process shall be done by the state/UT education department/s.

The cost of the registration, examination of out of school children shall be borne by the respective state/UT.
The state/UT will have the responsibility to identify the schools which will act as the registered study centre for NIOS for the purpose of imparting education to the registered out- of- school children.
The identified schools/Study centres will help the registered learners to complete their assignments, conduct practical exams and also prepare them for Theory Exams which will be conducted by NIOS.

A dedicated web portal has been developed to cater to the need for registration of out of school children across the country. The portal will

help register, track, monitor and certify the out of school children.
This entire process will be dealt through the state education department.
Every State/UT will have a dedicated dashboard to monitor the registration and to track the registered out of school children.
Every child registered on the portal through the state education department on the dedicated web portal will be assigned a permanent unique ID which will be helpful to identify the learner even after completion of the course from NIOS.
Analytical dashboards will be available for the Ministry officials, NIOS officials, state, district and block level officials to monitor the entire learner base through the dedicated portal.