At the 10th consecutive EW ECE National Conference, over 400 ECCE professionals, academics, principals and teachers from 70 cities across the country congregrated in Mumbai last month. They discussed best practices in ECCE and ways and means to universalise early childhood care and education in India – Summiya Yasmeen A decade ago in 2010, EducationWorld hosted the country’s first-ever Early Childhood Education National Conference in Mumbai to highlight the vital importance of early childhood care and education (ECCE) in the education continuum, and felicitate the country’s top-ranked preschools following India’s first ratings and ranking survey of preschools commissioned by this publication. Since then, the EW Early Childhood Education National Conference, alternatively staged in Mumbai and Bangalore, has evolved into a much-anticipated annual event that attracts ECCE professionals from across the country. To turn the wheel full circle, the landmark 10th EW ECE National Conference 2020 was deliberately convened in Mumbai on January 23. At the day-long conference, over 400 ECCE professionals, academics, principals and teachers from 70 cities across the country congregated in the packed ballroom of the upscale Sahara Star Hotel to discuss and debate best practices, new trends in early childhood care and deliberate upon ways and means to enable provision of professionally administered ECCE to all of India’s 164 million children in the 0-5 age group. Welcoming the delegates, Dilip Thakore, publisher-editor of EducationWorld, expressed satisfaction that the true value of ECCE has dawned upon government and academia. “Since 2010, when EducationWorld staged its first ECE National Conference, we have been in the vanguard of a growing national movement to pressure government to accord high priority to ECCE. It’s a matter of satisfaction that there is some traction on this important issue with the draft National Education Policy 2019 of the K. Kasturirangan Committee according high importance to early childhood education and proposing “seamless” extension of ECCE to class III with the recommendation this “pedagogical unit” be described as “foundational stage” education. The draft NEP has also endorsed the long-pending demand of EW and the Early Childhood Association to bring ECCE, currently under the jurisdiction of the Union ministry of women and child development, under the purview of the HRD ministry,” said Thakore, speaking on the occasion. The welcome address was followed by four keynote addresses delivered by nationally reputed ECCE experts. Dr. Venita Kaul, professor emerita and former founder-director of the Centre for Early Childhood Education and Development, Ambedkar University, Delhi commented on ‘The Draft National Education Policy’s belated discovery of early childhood care & education’. Dr. Swati Popat Vats, president of the Podar Jumbo Kids preschools chain and founder-president of the Early Childhood Association of India, which has a membership of 10,678 preschools across the country, delivered an engrossing lecture on ‘Incorporating the work of India’s pioneer early childhood educators into contemporary preschools’. Ruchita Dhar Shah, founder of the Facebook group First Moms Club which has a membership of 200,000 in 100 countries, explained ‘Why preschools should resist parental pressure for academic learning in pre-primary education’ and…
