By IANS
New Delhi : Public schools in the capital can frame their own guidelines for admissions to nursery classes but the educational qualification and income of parents cannot be included, the Delhi government said Friday.
State Education Minister Arvinder Singh Lovely said that the government would monitor the guidelines and that parents also cannot be interviewed.
“Parents can be called only after the schools declare the admission list,” he said.
Schools should observe three parameters while forming guidelines, neighbourhood, alumini and siblings, to assess the child on a scale of 100 points.
But since schools have their own requirements, there would be “no cap on points assigned to any one parameter”, he told reporters.
From now on, nursery classes will be known as pre-school for which the admission age has been fixed at three years and for kindergarten, which will be known as pre-primary, the admission age is four years.
“Children admitted to pre-school class last year will be promoted to pre-primary this year without having to undergo re-admission, and every child completing three years as on March 31, 2008, would get admission in the pre-school class,” the minister said.
Schools that do not have pre-primary classes have been given three years to start the classes, he said.
Minority schools can add community status as one of the parameters for admission, he said.
However, most private schools are unhappy with the government not allowing them to interact with the child or parents during admission.
The private aided and unaided schools have decided to request the Department of Education of the Delhi government to extend the time limit for submission of guidelines for pre-primary classes and also review the clause that prevents formal interaction with children and parents.
“We have decided to request the education department to extend the deadline of submitting guidelines for admission. We will also request the department to review the clause that prevents formal interaction with children and parents. We should be given autonomy to know about the financial and socio-cultural background of students,” said S.L. Jain, secretary of National Progressive School Conference, a body of 300 schools.
The deadline for schools to submit the parameters they would use to admit children into nursery and pre-primary classes ended Friday. The directorate of education (DoE) will assess the norms within four weeks to help the schools begin their admission process.
The Delhi High Court had said that schools are free to fix their own parameters for admitting students as long as they take into account certain government-specified norms and get their set of parameters cleared by DoE.