Grave Challenges, Great Opportunities

Despite all prognostications and apprehensions — prompted by awareness that ECE is an area of darkness and an unmonitored sector of Indian education — the country’s first ECE global conference attracted a record number of delegates and a stellar cast of pre-school experts and professionals from India and abroad

By all accounts and assessments, india’s first-ever ECE (Early Childhood Education) Global Conference 2010, convened in Mumbai by Education- World on July 17 to deliberate on the theme ‘ECE: Opportunities and Challenges’ and related issues, was an unexpected success.

Despite all prognostications and apprehensions — prompted by awareness that ECE is an area of darkness and an unmonitored sector of Indian education — the number of fee-paying delegates who registered for the day-long seminar surpassed all expectations aggregating 247, a mix of private pre-school promoters, educators, principals and teachers from across the country. Moreover, living up to its billing as the country’s first early childhood education global conference, it provoked the interest and participation of a stellar cast of ECE experts and professionals from the US, Singapore and India.

The conference also attracted the enthusiastic support of pioneer educators and firms who have invested considerable resources to begin delivery of vitally important, high-quality, professionally administered early childhood care and education to a small but growing number of children in the age group 18-72 months. Prominent among them were Navneet Publications Ltd, Universal Education Group and Educraft — all Mumbai-based early childhood educa-tion service providers who joined hands with EducationWorld to convene the ECE Global Conference 2010 at Mumbai’s five-star Grand Hyatt Hotel.

Following the traditional lighting of  a ceremonial lamp to inaugurate the conference, in her keynote power point aided presentation titled ‘Challenges and opportunities in early childhood education’, Dr. Elanna Yalow, an alumna of the Standford School of Education and Stanford Business School and currently the Portland, Oregon-based  vice chair of the Knowledge Learning Corporation and vice president of Knowledge Universe, advanced a strong case for larger investment of resources in ECE worldwide, and made the startling observation that 70 percent of the brain development activity of every indivi-dual happens during the age of 0-3 years.

“A child’s earliest experiences impact ability to think, speak, learn, and establish relationships. Therefore the quality of a child’s early experiences can affect her future development, both cognitively and socially; her economic well-being and success in school and the workplace. It’s far more difficult to build skills when there is a weak foundation of brain circuitry. It’s very important to bear in mind that the benefits of early childhood education not only impact an individual child, but  society, nation, and world,” said Yalow in an impassioned keynote address which outlined the framework and set the tone for the country’s first ECE global conference.

Dr. Yalow’s observations about the critical importance of early childhood education and its implications for societal and national development is — or should be — bad news for this country’s politicians, bureaucrats and establishment educationists who have formulated and supervised implement-ation of India’s education policies for the past six decades since indepen-dence. Because the overwhelming majority of India’s 110 million infants in the 0-5 age group are not only being openly and continuously denied early childhood care and education, 46 percent of the country’s under-five infants are suffering severe malnutrition (according to UNDP’s Human Develop-ment Report 2009) which could cause widespread brain damage and idiocy.

This shocking condition of India’s under-five infants persists despite the Union government’s nationwide Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme having been operational since 1975. Under the programme, 1.3 million anganwadis (crèches) have been established across the country to provide early childhood care and nutrition to infants and their mothers. Although huge allocations are annually made under this national programme (Budget 2009-10 outlay: Rs.6,706 crore) to provide supplementary nutrition,  immunisation, referral services, and pre-school non-formal education, as evidenced by the shocking 46 percent of infants under age five suffering severe malnutrition, ICDS has been a colossal failure.

Moreover essentially a supplementary nutrition programme, ICDS has almost completely neglected its pre-school education mandate. Despite this, the recently enacted historic Right to Free and Compulsory Education (aka RTE) Act, 2009 which makes it mandatory for the ‘State’ to provide free and compul-sory education to all children between 6-14 years of age, conspicuously omits infants in the age group 0-5, absolving the Central, state and local governments from compulsorily providing day care and/or early childhood education centres.

Madhav Chavan, founder chief executive of Pratham (estb.1994), the country’s largest primary education NGO which provides supplementary education to 450,000 children in  learning centres in 43 cities country-wide, confirms that the early childhood education ICDS provides to children in the age group 3-5 (“Indian children are rarely enroled in institutions before age three”) is negligible. “Quite obviously in the light of contemporary neuro-science studies indicating that 70 percent of a child’s brain is developed in early childhood, greater provision should be made for ECE, but competing demands for larger outlays for K-12 education have made ECE a low priority segment of the education spectrum,” says Chavan.

Prof. R. Govinda, the pro tem vice chancellor of the Delhi-based National University of Educational Planning and Administration also believes that in terms of implementation and attainment of objectives, the 35-year-old ICDS has been a big disappointment. “As evidenced by the statistic that 46 percent of India’s children under five are severely malnutritioned, the Central government’s ICDS initiative has been a miserable failure. Likewise, the programme has done little to provide pre-school education to poor rural or urban children,” he says.

Lack of awareness about the critical  importance of ECE is reflected in the total freedom that privately-promoted pre-schools — an overwhelmingly urban phenomenon — enjoy to run their institutions without bureaucratic inter-ference from the education ministries of the country’s 29 state governments and seven union territories. Surprisingly — against the backdrop of over-regulation of private primary, secondary and higher education institutions by under-qualified, over-zealous government inspectors given to demanding money with menaces — pre-school education is not subject to any government or institutional rules and regulations.

Consequently, with middle class India experiencing the phenomenon of double-income households following the historic liberalisation and deregul-ation of the Indian economy in 1991 which almost tripled annual rates of GDP growth, enterprising businessmen have been quick to discern growing demand for quality, professionally-administered early childhood education for children of India’s 200 million strong aspirational, upwardly mobile middle class.

This growing awareness within the middle class of the importance of giving children an early start in education is the stimulus behind the rash of good, bad and faux pre-schools having mush-roomed countrywide in the new millennium. Although a small minority of highly-qualified edupreneurs with certification and training in the world’s best specialist schools of education have promoted high-end pre-schools benchmarked against the world’s best, volume and scale in ECE is being provided by the large number of pre-schools which have sprung up across the country under the franchise model.

According to Arun Khetan, a pioneer of the burgeoning private ECE sector in his capacity as the first chief executive of the Kidzee, Roots to Wings and incumbent promoter-CEO of the I Play I Learn pre-school chains — all established under the franchise model — currently the number of franchised pre-schools established nationwide aggregates 2,800 with an estimated enrolment of 250,000 children in the 2-5 age group.

“The franchise model offers internationally comparable good quality standardised pre-school education at affordable prices to millions of children countrywide. As such it serves a very useful social purpose,” Khetan informed the 270-plus audience comprising ECE edupreneurs, educators, principals, and teachers who thronged India’s first ECE global conference.

The socio-economic beneficial outcomes of dissemination of ECE/pre-school education were highlighted by Prof. Jeremy Williams, the Singapore-based chief academic officer (global) of Knowledge Universe in the second keynote address titled ‘The critical importance of foundational pre-school education’. Citing Prof. James Heckman of Chicago University who was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in the year 2000 to the effect that “the best evidence supports the policy prescription, invest in the very young”, Williams presented delegates with a large body of evidence indicating that resources invested in ECE provide better returns than investment in K-12 and higher education. “Every dollar invested in ECE gives a higher return than investment in later stages of the education continuum in terms of higher earnings of pre-schooled children resulting in higher tax revenues; increased labour-force participation of parents; higher achievement test scores; lower rates of grade repetition and special education; and higher educational attainment and lower risks of delinquency, crime and teenage pregnancy,” explained Williams.

Invoking a shocking statistic that of  361 million children who should be in school, a mere 219 million are in school in India, Williams recommended greater official and national focus on the physical and cognitive development of children in the age group 0-5. “More broadly, ECE policy needs to be developed within the context of comprehensive public policy to support child development from birth to age 5 and beyond with priority for socio-economically disadvantaged children who are likely to benefit most,” he said.

Against the backdrop of the Union government’s nationwide  ICDS progra-mme almost completely ignoring the early learning needs of infants and the Right to Education Act, 2009 conspi-cuously excluding children in the 0-5 age group, the great majority of India’s 110 million children in this age group are bereft of critically important early childhood education. Fortunately, a small but growing number of private edupreneurs combining social enterprise with enlightened self-interest have stepped into the breach to provide ECE services to the children of the country’s aspirational and productive middle class. The public interest demands that they are not subjected to the dubious attention of government inspectors who have stymied the development and expansion of private initiatives in K-12 education overwhelmingly preferred by the public, and that ECE providers will cooperate to devise a self-regulatory code. Simultaneously, there is an urgent need for the nationwide ICDS programme to be strengthened and fortified with age-appropriate educational content so that “socio-economically disadvantaged child-ren who are likely to benefit most” are not denied the advantage of early learning and brain develop-ment when they need it most.

Fortuitously the country’s first ECE Global Conference 2010, convened by EducationWorld in partnership with enlightened edupreneurs and educators, was successful in shedding light upon the grey area of early childhood education and its vital importance for national development, if responses of delegates (see box) are any indication. Our intent is to make the ECE global conference an annual event dedicated to creating greater awareness of age-appropriate pedagogies and institutional management issues in this vital sector of education.

Meanwhile edited and abridged summaries of the insightful addresses made at the EducationWorld ECE Global Global Conference 2010 are presented below.