By IANS
New Delhi : The Delhi High Court Wednesday refused to accept the Delhi government’s guidelines for admission of children in nursery classes in the private schools that have rejected an expert panel’s recommendations.
A division bench headed by Chief Justice M.K. Sarma said, “We find it (guidelines) vague to some extent and it needs to be fine tuned.”
The court asked the state government to make the guidelines clearer in “wordings” by Monday if it did not want to introduce the Ganguly committee recommendations of point systems.
It also rejected the plea of the Association of the Private Schools and said there was no need to make a child study two years in primary stage and the Delhi Education Act has specified that the entry to class I should be at the age of five years.
The court said Clause 6 of the guidelines spoke about no interview of the children but it was silent about the interview of parents by the school management.
Asking government counsel Sultan Singh to add that the parents will not be interviewed, the court said, “From your guidelines it appears that parents will be the candidates and the schools will interview them. Why didn’t you say that no interview of the parents would be held but only the interaction?”
Authorities have been asked to file the application by Nov 19.
In an application last week, the government submitted that it had issued guidelines and asked private schools to start the nursery admission process from Nov 30 after devising their own admission criteria – an indication of the government’s rejection of the Ganguly Committee’s point-based admission system.
In a petition, a group of 400 private schools had asked the court to review its order on the age limit for admission to nursery and Class I.
Last year the court had ruled that the schools should adhere to the Delhi Education Act.
The pre-primary education should be restricted to one year and a child should be four years of age at the time of admission to nursery classes and five years for Class I, the order said.
The government had asked the schools to devise their own criteria and start admissions from Nov 30.
It said that it favoured more freedom for schools in admissions, but insisted there will be no interviews for children and that three years is the minimum age. Schools have also been told to consider children from all backgrounds.
The government will also set up a monitoring cell in every district to look into admission-related complaints. Further, it has asked schools to get their admission criteria approved by the managing committee of the school with the consent of the Director of Education.
The Delhi government informed the court that it was in favour of giving them guided autonomy.
The government said keeping in view their separate identities, these schools should be allowed to develop their own criteria for admissions to these classes.