Tamil Nadu Government and Government Aided School Reforms in 2019

The Tamilnadu government has announced many new reforms to government schools this year to improve the quality of learning and bring it on par with the private schools. Last month it was announced that the teachers of the government-aided schools must pass the assessment test held by the education ministry or else will be dismissed.

Unlike government schools, government-aided schools don’t choose their teachers based on the Teachers Eligibility Test, but rather by formal interview only. Thus to standardise the quality of teachers across government-funded schools, the assessment test is being conducted and the government is conducting training classes too for the teachers.

Uniform change

With complaints coming from parents and students that the current colour scheme of the government school uniforms attracts discrimination, the ministry has introduced new colour schemes for students from classes 1 to 8.

The classes from 1 st to 5th are given dark green pants for boys and skirts for girls and light green checked shirts for both. Similarly, for classes 6th to 8th sandal coloured pants and checked shirts for boys and sandal coloured pants and overcoats for girls are allotted. The uniforms are provided free for the 40.66 lakh school provided lunch eaters.

Biometric attendance for teachers

The teachers will have to use their biometric data basically their fingerprints to log their attendance from June onwards in government and government-aided schools. This system is being implemented for two reasons.

The first is that it is done as a part of the ongoing process of digitising the paper-based processes in schools to reduce paper trails and ensure data availability and easy accessibility. The second reason is to regularise the attendance of the teachers who are conducting tuitions outside the classes for some extra money.