National Education Policy of Nepal 2076

News 12 Dec 2019 30982

National Education Policy of Nepal 2076 / 2019

Education is also considered an infrastructure for the country's development. It develops well-qualified, capable, competitive, and productive individuals whose contributions are crucial to the nation's economic, social, cultural, and infrastructure development.

Education is vital to the country's sustainable peace, good governance, development, and prosperity. "Prosperous Nepal, Happy Nepali" is our national aspiration and determination. Skilled, scientific, practical, and quality education is the cornerstone of a prosperous Nepal. Since education is the mainstay of the country's overall development, equitable access to quality education for all citizens must be established.

Article 31 of the Constitution of Nepal states the right to education. The clause guarantees every citizen the right to access basic education, every citizen to get basic education from the state, and free and secondary level education, free higher education as per law to the disabled and economically disadvantaged, and every Nepali community living in Nepal. According to the education received in their mother tongue and vice versa, schools and educational institutions will have the right to establish and operate such education, guaranteed by the right Molik. Developing a strong national education system is essential to implement this constitutional provision.

Goals, objectives, policies, and programs are formulated to determine the outlook and priorities for the country's development.

Education policy reflects the nation's educational development outlook and workforce. Kane also tries to address its national development aspirations through its education policy. In this context, the government of Nepal formulated this National Education Policy 2076 as a guiding principle for the education sector under a federal structure.

Problems and Challenges:

Despite Nepal's education system's achievements, new challenges and problems remain. The main issues facing Nepal's education system are the low effectiveness of early childhood development programs, the low capacity, and facilities of early child development (ECD) teachers, the fact that not all children of the basic school age group have yet been enrolled in school, and the fact that not all students who have been enrolled in school continue to study.

Secondary education cannot be completely free, there is no coordination between education and employment, the number of educated unemployed is increasing, children from disadvantaged groups remain out of school, good educational governance cannot be maintained, higher education cannot be competitive, production-oriented and research-oriented, insufficient investment in education.

The quality of education is lower than expected, access to science and technology-based education and technical education cannot be expanded sufficiently, the service delivery system is not people-friendly, the teaching process is more exam-oriented, teachers' professional competence, ethics, and motivation are lacking, local community ownership cannot be created in public education, and schools run by the private sector are more profit-oriented than service-oriented.

The main challenges in the education sector are to improve the quality of public education, create ownership among stakeholders for educational reform, improve the quality of education at all levels, ensure professional accountability of teachers and education sector human resources, maintain educational good governance in the education system, strengthen the role of school leadership, maintain coordination between education and employment, prevent brain drain, create an environment that instills trust in public education among all citizens, and effectively implement the fundamental rights provided by the Constitution.

The fundamental rights related to education specified in the Constitution of Nepal, the restructuring of the state and the distribution of powers, the country's economic and social transformation agenda, Nepal's commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals, the foundation stone of the Fifteenth Plan, the goal of becoming a developing country from a least developed country by 2022, and the national resolve to upgrade to a middle-income country by 2030 are the main foundations for formulating the new education policy.

This new education policy is necessary to implement the basic fundamental right of every person to education, ensure simple, easy, and equitable access to education for all under the principles of a federal democratic republic, and make education universal, practical, competitive, and of high quality.

A timely education policy is needed to ensure people's right to education by effectively operating education administration at all three government levels by the federal framework. Similarly, this national education policy has been formulated to unify and codify scattered education sector policies and fulfill the need for a unified national education policy.

Objective:

To make early childhood development and education focused on the all-round development of children of high quality and effective.
To ensure easy and equitable access and continuity of basic education for all and to guarantee universal, life-saving, competitive, and quality compulsory and free education.
To prepare competitive, skilled, and productive human resources with creativity, inventiveness, studiousness, positive thinking, and morality by ensuring free access to quality secondary education for all.
To prepare qualified, competent, skilled, and entrepreneurial human resources for the country's development by establishing inclusive and equitable access for all interested citizens by widely expanding technical and vocational education and training opportunities.
To develop qualified, competent, skilled, and entrepreneurial human resources for the country's development by increasing the access to and quality of higher education, constructing a knowledge-based society and economy, and providing competent leadership in various fields.
To become a fully literate country, Nepal must develop a lifelong learning culture through informal, alternative, traditional, and open education.
To ensure access to quality education for all types of people with disabilities and to prepare competent and competitive citizens to lead a dignified life through lifelong education. To ensure professional competence, honesty, commitment, and accountability of the human resources providing services in various education system components to perform excellent results and maintain good educational governance.
To integrate the existing best practices of the public and private educational sectors and strengthen the effective mobilization, regulation, and transformation of private educational institutions in the public education system transformation process.
To develop educational quality standards and criteria based on national and international experience and practice and to enhance the quality of education at all levels and types.
To develop a national competency-based education system by establishing interrelationships between formal, non-formal, and informal education, ensuring equivalency, mobility, and permeability of qualifications.
To fulfill the constitutional and legal obligation of education, educational investment must be sufficient, equitable, and best value for money based on national priorities.
To develop the ability to use traditional and modern technology for national development by integrating science and technology into the education system to develop scientific thinking and behavior in individuals.

Strategy:

To ensure a child-friendly environment with appropriate infrastructure and expand opportunities for early childhood development.
To provide at least one year of early childhood development opportunities for the overall development of children and their preparation for school education in partnership with all three levels of government and parents.
Enroll all children in school to ensure compulsory and free basic education, ensure continuity of studies for all those enrolled, and adopt motivational measures to enhance quality.
Adopting formal, informal, alternative, and open education systems ensures everyone can access relevant, quality Basic and Secondary education.
Effectively manage secondary education with the participation of the government, private sector, and cooperatives.
Autonomy, decentralization, partnership, flexibility, and simple regulation should create an environment for broad participation in technical and vocational education and training.
Ensure sustainable investment in the participation and partnership of various stakeholders in technical and vocational education and training. Adopt a policy of providing special concessions to disadvantaged groups, regions, and communities in technical and vocational education and training.
Provide relevant, valuable, quality, and competitive technical and vocational education and skill development opportunities to all according to their qualifications and capabilities, based on the needs and priorities of the national, provincial, and local labor markets.
Increase access to higher education through open and distance education to ensure credibility and competitiveness.
Restructure the existing legal and institutional mechanisms to effectively establish, operate, regulate, and manage higher education institutions.
Improving the quality of higher education institutions will make it relevant to national needs and international norms and practices.
Develop universities and higher education institutions as public, community, and private institutions. In coordination with the provinces, encourage interested universities among the currently operating universities to operate as universities.
Link literacy, informal education, and lifelong learning with professions, business, social life, and participation.
To increase access to school education by mainstreaming traditional education and expanding opportunities for alternative and open education.
Make physical infrastructure, curriculum and teaching materials, teaching-learning process, and assessment system inclusive and disability-friendly.
To provide appropriate educational opportunities through special education and inclusive education based on the needs of children with disabilities and the principles of inclusion.
To achieve excellent teaching, training, research, innovation, and educational administration results by managing skilled, qualified, competent, and quality human resources.
Make competency testing and training mandatory for teaching or training human resources in school education, technical and vocational education, and higher education. Arrange for competency testing of currently employed teachers and link aspects such as professional competency, up-to-dateness, motivation, performance level, and experience with teacher career development.
To enhance the quality of school education, schools should ensure that they have subject-specific teachers and improve the teacher preparation, acquisition, development, and utilization system.
Attract talented students who have achieved excellent university results to the teaching profession.
Restructure, strengthen, and empower the educational service delivery structures of all three levels of government as needed to make them efficient, effective, and result-oriented.
Map, adjust, and upgrade schools, technical schools, and public, community, and private institutions providing higher education.
Information and communication technology should be integrated as an integral part of the teaching-learning process and made technology-friendly, practical, and result-oriented. Strengthening the online-based Integrated Educational Management Information System (IEMIS) at the federal, provincial, and local levels.
To enhance the educational quality of public schools through the creation of ownership, strengthening of leadership, improvement of the teaching-learning process, promotion of professional ethics, increased investment, and the highest use of technology.
To regulate private educational institutions operated as companies in school education.
To arrange for effective monitoring, inspection, and evaluation of educational institutions to enhance academic quality.
To implement a credit banking and transfer system based on the National Qualification Framework (NQF).
To make arrangements for testing and certification of skills acquired formally and informally.
To increase investment by all three levels of government in school and higher education.
To gradually increase public sector investment in technical and vocational education and mobilize resources in this area based on the principle of cost sharing.
To emphasize the development of the tendency and behavior of scientific study and reflection by making science education and education science-based.
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education will be integrated into the curriculum at all levels.