Arunachal Pradesh launches 'guide' scheme to improve education

The Arunachal Pradesh education department has launched a new scheme, ‘Guide’, for nurturing government schools and to improve the education scenario of the state. The new scheme is premised on the concept of mentoring, official sources said here on Tuesday. Mentoring as a concept has been in practice in the context of schools in some states successfully. Learning from these experiences, the department was putting it in the form of “GUIDE” for the schools in the state, the sources said. “It works on the belief that every educated and well-informed individual needs to attach him or her with the present day school system. As they say charity begins at home, the officers in the department and in the districts are expected to become the torchbearers of this strategy,” the sources said. For a beginning, ‘GUIDE’ intends to cover secondary and senior secondary schools in the state which would gradually be extended to the elementary and primary schools. ‘GUIDE’ neither involves financial expenditure nor intends to substitute the inspection mechanism of the school education system. An officer will have a choice to select a school to become ‘GUIDE’, sources said. “However, it is expected that in case of more takers for a particular school, the deputy commissioner will be the decision maker. It is also important that one school is mentored by only one officer throughout the academic session. Engagement of anyone who would be retiring within this session may be avoided,” the sources said. The goal was to cover all 234 secondary and senior secondary schools. The department has fixed a target of improving the examination performance to above 75 per cent for less than 60 per cent achievers in 2012-13; above 90 per cent for the remaining; raising the numbers of first divisioners in class XII (at least one third of the class) and bringing some students in 90 per cent above category, the sources added. Source: Education News