With pre-primary education hit hardest by the pandemic lockdown for the second year in succession, we are obliged to publish a truncated survey. C fore personnel interviewed 3,205 sample respondents to rate preschools in six cities on ten parameters of early childhood excellence One of the conspicuous successes of EducationWorld, ambitiously launched in November 1999 with the mission “to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda,” is that it has impacted the vital importance of professionally administered early childhood care and education (ECCE) upon the academy, policy formulators and the public. Today it’s difficult to believe that a decade ago there was little awareness in the academy and government that good quality ECCE is critically important because it builds the foundation of all future learning. In the new millennium, James Heckman, a Nobel Prize winning economist, posited that a dollar spent on professionally provided ECCE saves $16 in higher education because students provided quality early childhood education are mentally and emotionally equipped to absorb knowledge and grasp abstract concepts with greater speed and facility. Therefore in 2010, your editors conducted the first ever ratings and ranking of private pre-primaries, aka preschools — some of them of over 50 years vintage but almost totally unknown beyond their civic ward limits — in India’s major cities. The annual ranking surveys were followed up with star-studded seminars, workshops and conferences at which ECCE experts of international and national renown called attention to the crucial role of scientifically designed, play-based, interactive curriculums and global best practices, and India’s most-reputed ECCE providers networked and exchanged notes. Thus far, EducationWorld has conducted nine national surveys rating preschools on selected parameters of pre-primary education excellence and ranked them inter se in 16 cities and towns of India. Moreover, we have staged an equivalent number of national ECCE Awards nites at which hitherto totally ignored promoters, principals and teachers of top-ranked preschools across the country were certified and celebrated. It is also pertinent to note that private preschools apart, since 2018 we have been rating, ranking and celebrating the country’s best government-managed anganwadis — essentially nutrition centres for newborns and lactating mothers promoted by the Central government since 1976 — that also provide a modicum of early childhood education. Currently, there are 1.6 million anganwadis operational countrywide which provide rudimentary ECCE to 85 million of the country’s 165 million children in the 0-6 age group. Thus far over a decade, your editors have been championing the cause of universal professionally provided ECCE for youngest children in all strata of society. Persistent championing of universal ECCE by your editors has paid off, even if belatedly. The new National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 accords high importance to formal ECCE for infants. It proposes replacement of the current national 10+2 primary-secondary and higher secondary schools system with a 5+3+3+4 system incorporating five years of foundational education — including ECCE — for all children in the 3-8 age group. Unfortunately, because of India’s…
