Government ‘widens’ campaign to improve out-of-school students’ reading skills

In the first phase, starting from April, the children will be given training in Hindi language that includes basic alphabet recognition, word formation and sentence formation.

The Directorate of Education (DoE) has issued fresh guidelines for improving the reading skills of the out-of-school students enrolled in the Special Training Centres (STCs) in around 900 government and municipal schools across Delhi.

The STCs help out-of-school children — who have either dropped out of school or were never enrolled — get admitted into their age-appropriate classes in government schools. (Burhaan Kinu/HT PHOTO)

The DoE asked all the Heads of Schools (HoS) where STCs are running to “widen” the ongoing reading campaigns for the enrolled students and conduct the exercise in three phases in each academic session from now onwards.

In the first phase, starting from April, the children will be given training in Hindi language that includes basic alphabet recognition, word formation and sentence formation. The second phase will begin in August during which students will be trained in basic mathematics skills such as numbers, addition and subtraction. And, in the last phase in December, the students will get to learn the English language.

The STCs help out-of-school children — who have either dropped out of school or were never enrolled in one — enrol into their age-appropriate classes in government schools after giving them training for three months to two years depending on their needs as a part of Union government’s Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA).

The directorate also released district-wise data of the outcome of the month-long reading campaign launched in December last year. As per the data, 38.1% students enrolled in STCs across the city were at alphabet level of Hindi language learning. “Of them around 19.2% students crossed the level and reached the paragraph reading level,” states the data shared by the DoE.

Similarly, improvement was recorded in the number of students who graduated to the paragraph level.

“The percentage of students who could read the paragraphs reached 24.5% from 11.2%,” the circular stated.