Promising developments in ECCE

A growing number of private sector edupreneurs have started adapting global best practices in early childhood care and education FOR ALMOST HALF A CENTURY after independence, early childhood education if not care, was the blindspot of India™s education establishment and omniscient pundits of the Delhi-based Planning Commission who assumed the mission-impossible burden of centrally planning every socio-economic development countrywide. Although the Central government introduced its Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) in 1975 and has over the years established 1.6 million anganwadis ” early childhood mother and child care centres ” countrywide, they are essentially nutrition centres for poor household lactating mothers and malnourished children, offering little by way of early childhood education. Even so, the country™s 1.6 million anganwadis provide basic nutrition to only 76 million of the country™s 158 million children in the age group 1-5. Professionally delivered ECCE or nursery school remained the preserve of a tiny upper class minority until the dawn of the new millennium when new neuroscience research in the Western OECD countries established that structured and specialised early childhood education is vital since the brains of children are 90 percent developed by age eight. This discovery and awareness that the world™s largest under-five child population was grossly under-served by way of professionally administered nursery and pre-primary schools, prompted the promotion of a large number of pre-primary schools by well-known foreign and indigenous brands such as EuroKids and Zee among others. According to the Mumbai-based Early Childhood Association, currently there are an estimated 300,000 private preschools providing professionally administered ECCE to an estimated 10 million infants and children in the age group 1-5 countrywide. The promotion of the Mumbai-based Early Childhood Association (ECA) in 2010 which currently has a membership of 970 preschools across the country, is in itself a positive development. Led by Swati Popat Vats, president of the 167-strong Podar Jumbo Kids chain, ECA has been propagating the important message that hitherto academically neglected infants need professionally structured early childhood care and education. œChildren go through a period of rapid learning in the first five years. The most embedded parts of our personality ” attitudes, moral values, emotional tendencies, learning abilities, how we deal with people and situations ” are determined by experiences that we have had between the ages 0-5. That™s when all human beings learn to adapt and respond to the world. In April this year, 16 neuroscientists specialising in nutrition, chemistry and child development discussed and debated the influence of early years education on brain development at the Unicef offices in New York. Three messages were delivered to Unicef from this meeting. One of them was that ˜early intervention is the answer: it becomes progressively harder to fix problems™. Or as the New York Times editorial put it, it makes more sense to invest in preschools than prisons, said Popat Vats in a recent interview with EducationWorld. ECA has also made several important suggestions to make the NECCE policy more effective and written an eight-page letter to prime minister Narendra…