CHENNAI: The high-level committee constituted to provide a uniform standard of education in the State will submit its recommendations soon, School Education Minister Thangam Thennarasu informed the Assembly on Monday.

The committee had a six-month timeframe.

The Government had constituted the committee with former Bharathidasan University Vice-Chancellor Muthukumaran as chairman to introduce a uniform standard of education (samacheer kalvi) up to Class X.

Once the uniform standard is introduced there will be only one stream of education in the State.

"When I spoke to Dr. Muthukumaran, he told me that he would submit the report this month," the Minister said, adding that once this was done his department would discuss the recommendations with Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi and take appropriate action.

Members who spoke on the issue, including P. Dillibabu (CPI-M), T. Ramasamy (CPI) and E.S.S. Raman (Congress), stressed the need for introduction of the single stream of education from the coming academic year.

Mr. Raman wanted the recommendations to be implemented after broad discussions so that people did not approach the court to stall the move.

Grace marks

On the question of grace marks, the Minister said that there was only one wrong question in the Plus-Two examination and this too was limited to the Physics paper of the English medium.

Students who took the examination in the English medium would be given five grace marks, he said in reply to T.Malaravan (AIADMK), who had contended that students should be given grace marks because of the wrong questions in Chemistry and Physics papers.

Higher outlay

Mr. Thennarasu said that the outlay for school education earmarked for 2007-08 was Rs.7,056.57 crore, 30 per cent more than amount allocated the previous year. Just over 50 per cent of this was meant for primary education, he said, adding that this amounted to Rs. 840 crore more than the allocation made last year.

The Government had introduced activity-based learning in select primary schools to ensure that education was child-centred and task-based and to enable children enjoy the act of learning. Since this experiment was a success, it had decided to extend it to all primary schools. The Minister said that the Net Enrolment Rate in upper primary classes stood at 99.29 per cent and 98.25 per cent.

The interventions of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan reduced the dropout rate at the primary level to 1.91 per cent from 3.81 per cent in 2005-06.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail