Getting pass mark for teacher education college not easy, says Santosh Panda

Chennai: Starting a teacher education college in the state would now be difficult as the National Council of Teacher Education (NCTE) has asked the Tamil Nadu Teachers Education University not to grant no-objection certificates to all applicants. Instead, it has recommended that only cases where the university felt there was a dire need should be considered as there are already over 600 teacher education colleges in Tamil Nadu.

Raising his concern about mushrooming of teacher education colleges in Tamil Nadu, NCTE chairman Prof. Santosh Panda said that he would not hesitate to underline that teacher education in some of these colleges might not be viable. “I urge all stakeholders to engage with us (NCTE) and also urge all those not able to do good work with their college to invest elsewhere, not in educational institutes,” he said while speaking to reporters on the sidelines of an international conference organised by the Tamil Nadu Teachers Education University on Monday.

Prof.Panda said that state government and the affiliating university should check the mushrooming of institutions. “In the past if an applicant fulfilled all criteria, then the university would forward the application to the council, but now the university needs to do an evaluation whether there is a need for a college,” he said.

Earlier in his address at the conference Prof.Panda pointed out that the new NCTE (Recognition Norms & Procedure) Regulation 2014 would be implemented across the country from July this year.

“With the new regulation, B.Ed will be a two year programme. Tamil Nadu has raised some issues, like whether they can implement the second year of the programme now. So they have asked us for more time to prepare for the second year,” he said.