Context: Early Childhood Education (ECE) is crucial to the overall development of children, with impacts on their learning and even earning capabilities throughout their lifetimes.
Issues in Early Childhood Education
Impact of pandemic: During COVID-19 pre-school closures, access has reduced due to less focus on the continuance of ECE delivery during the COVID-19 school closures.
Job and income losses led to de-prioritisation of education.
Issues in anganwadi system: Most children attending preschool are enrolled in the nearly 14 lakh anganwadis spread across the country where there is low attendance and instructional time, and,
Prioritisation of other early childhood development services.
Low priority for ECE within households: In Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy’s report, 45% of the 650+ households surveyed in urban Maharashtra prioritise their older child’s education over ECE.
Lack of priority for ECE often means that households choose to forgo investing in ECE altogether.
Barrier of access: Socioeconomic background of households determines access to preschools and the ability to invest in ECE. The pandemic has highlighted the glaring digital divide in the country.
Many parents lack the self-efficacy to support their child’s learning due to lack of knowledge of effective methods to facilitate learning within the home, and appropriate means of using technology.
Parents in low-income households are additionally less likely to be able to access support to learn such methods.
Way forward
Active parental engagement in their child’s education, as children in age group of three to six years spend a majority of their time within household and rely greatly on parental assistance in learning process.
Conducive home environment in addition to equitable access to schooling system in early stages could lead to overall development of a child. For example:
Act of making conversation with a child in early years has significant gains on language skills.
Committed state action to internalise the importance of ECE among parents.
Operationalise support of the state, schools and teachers towards the goal of enabling parental engagement at home.
Empower households: Efforts must be taken to empower households with time and resources so that they have the ability to prioritise ECE.
Provision of non-educational support to low-income households to alleviate income and food insecurities might be crucial in aiding parents to invest in education.
Adequate resources and institutional support to teachers: Teachers are first point of contact with both the child and the parents. Hence, equipped to effectively engage with parents and address their challenges.
Design adaptable and innovative modes of teaching and learning. Collect and expand on information about teachers’ experiences and on innovations they have developed to increase parental engagement during school closures.
Applications of innovative solutions like E-paatshala programme in Balwadis run by Rocket Learning, and Akanksha schools in Mumbai and Pune resulted in higher parental engagement in ECE.
Provision of rations and devices for education.
E-paatshala to make available materials at home for educational activities.
Decentralised approach of identifying and alleviating barriers to ECE, through teachers and school systems as the forerunners.