With an aim to improve standard of education in the government-managed schools, an innovative programme ‘focus monitoring for quality education’ has been taken up on experimental basis in Ganjam district of Odisha.
The monitoring project was conceptualised and implemented from January this year. The programme involves surprise checks at government schools. The project is being implemented under active participation of Ganjam District Collector Prem Chand Choudhary, District Education Officer (DEO) Sanatan Panda, all administrative officials of education department as well as Block Development Officers (BDO).
The aim is intensive monitoring of all aspects of education in schools and eradication of problems within a definite time-frame. On Thursday, around 70 officials, including the Collector and DEO, got divided into groups of four members to visit 123 schools in the Hinjli block. “These visiting groups start their day from prayer at a school and monitor the happenings there throughout the day. One member monitors the aspects of classroom teaching, while three others check up the state of Mid-Day Meal (MDM), official record keeping as well as sanitation and state of the school campus,” said the DEO Mr Panda. The team members eat the MDM along with the students. In the evening all teams come up with their reports regarding each school.
A four-colour board has been conceived under the project, which is being put on display at all schools. In red colour, issues and problems found by the visiting team are mentioned with the target date when these problems may get solved. Remarks of commendation are written on green space of the board. Yellow and Blue spaces are meant for other remarks and instructions. Results of this programme have already started to show up. On Thursday the visiting officials found that two students at Dayapalli had not been attending the school. The team immediately located the students and their parents and counselled them. According to reports, both the students had returned to their school on Friday. Before Hinjli, similar intensive monitoring had been taken up in all the 92 government schools of Berhampur on January 19.
According to the DEO, the revenue block which would be visited by the teams for intensive inspection of schools is informed only a day ahead, which keeps authorities of schools in whole district prepared and up-to-date every month.
“This programme is in experimental mode and we are always trying to bring in new aspects to improve it,” he added.
