Students can fail Classes 5, 8; Parliament passes bill, Gujarat govt. welcomes the development

New Delhi: After Lok Sabha, today Rajya Sabha passed the amendment seeking revocation of ‘no detention’ policy in classes 5 and 8. The original Act stipulated that no child admitted in a school shall be held back in any class or expelled from school till the completion of elementary education.

The Rajya Sabha today passed the amendment seeking revocation of ‘no detention’ policy in classes 5 and 8, enabling states now to allow schools to fail the child if he/she fails in either or both classes and withhold their promotion to the next standard.

Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar had moved the ‘The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (Second Amendment) Bill, 2017’, which sought for regular examination in classes 5 and 8.

The original Act stipulated that no child admitted in a school shall be held back in any class or expelled from school till the completion of elementary education.

The amended Act will now have provisions not only for examination in both these classes, but will also extend powers to the state to hold back children, if they fail in re-examination– also provisioned in the amended Bill.

Moving the Bill, Javadekar had said that the amendment was necessary to improve the “learning outcomes” and that the demands for repeal of ‘no detention’ policy was made by many states and Union Territories in recent years which observed students scoring “poor marks”.

Reacting to this development, Bhupendrasinh Chudasama, education minister of Gujarat said the State government had made representations demanding same for number of times. Chudasama conveyed his thanks to the Government of India and Prakash Javdekar in a statement issued here. He said, the UPA government had in year 2009 made provision under RTI act not to fail any student in class 1 to 8. This had resulted into deteriorated quality of primary education. Chudasama said, with new law becoming effective, class – 5 and 8 students will be failed or passed to upper standard based on their performance in exam and assessment.

DeshGujarat