NCTE plans to reintroduce one-year BEd program after a decade
The course will be offered to candidates who have completed the four-year bachelor’s degree or obtained a master’s degree
NEW DELHI: The National Council for Teachers Education (NCTE) is planning to restart the one-year Bachelor of Education (BEd) course this year after a decade-long hiatus, in line with National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 recommendations, said the council chairman Pankaj Arora on Monday. The course will be offered to candidates who have completed the four-year bachelor’s degree or obtained a master’s degree.

The commission on Monday also constituted an eight-member committee to finalise curriculum framework of various courses including one year BEd programme in alignment with NEP provisions. In its meeting held on January 11, the governing body of the teacher’s education regulator approved several decisions related to teacher training courses, including the one-year BEd course. The commission is discussing the decisions with the education ministry and planning to bring them as draft NCTE regulations 2025 in public to later replace existing 2014 regulations after becoming Act, Arora said.
“One-year BEd programme will be for four-year undergraduate (UG) students and two-years postgraduate students. It will not be offered to those who have completed three-year UG programmes and they have to enrol in two-years BEd programme. Institutions offering the two-year BEd programme will have to become multidisciplinary institutes by 2028,” Arora told HT.
The NCTE had conducted the one-year BEd program since it began operations in 1995. However, in 2014, the course was discontinued following the recommendations of two expert panels -- one led by justice JS Verma and the other by Prof. Poonam Batra -- that highlighted the substandard quality of teacher training. Through ‘NCTE (Recognition Norms and Procedure) Regulations, 2014,’ the teacher education regulator increased the duration of BEd to two years including 20 weeks of mandatory internship in schools.
Explaining how NCTE moved from a one-year to two-year BEd programme, Batra, professor of Education at Delhi University (DU), said, “Universities in independent India continued to offer the one-year B.Ed. program that was inherited from the colonial era. NCTE, the regulatory body established by an Act of Parliament in 1995, did little to change this reality. In 2011, in response to the Maharashtra government’s opposition to NCTE’s recognition of a large number of private teacher training institutes, the Supreme Court constituted a high-powered Commission under justice JS Verma to review the sector of teacher education and the functioning of NCTE. The report of the Commission on teacher education was accepted in toto by the Supreme Court. One of its main recommendations was to change the BEd program into a two-year program to move beyond the colonial framework, contextualise the preparation of teachers in India’s diverse socio-cultural context and provide sufficient time for study and reflection on school knowledge, interdisciplinarity and pedagogic approaches. The NCTE notified the new teacher education norms based on commission recommendations in 2014. With this, teacher preparation in India was able to break colonial shackles.”
NCTE started a two-year BEd programme in 2015.
According to Batra, bringing back one-year BEd programme is like “bringing back colonial model and it is an “extremely regressive step.” She said this will “compromise the training of teachers.”
Responding to allegations, Arora said through one-year BEd, the NCTE is trying to ensure parity across all teacher education programs. “We are also concerned about teachers training and education and have constituted a committee to ensure that quality must not be compromised under one-year BEd programme. We will continue to provide practical training to students like internships in school.”
Arora said NCTE is also planning to launch specialised four-year Integrated Teachers Education Programme (ITEP) courses on Yoga, Sanskrit , Art and Physical Education from this year. Started in 2023-24 by NCTE, the ITEP is being offered by 64 institutes. NCTE will also start one-year master’s in education (MEd) and two-years duration MEd (part time) from this year, he said.
