The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
Nursery process may begin year in advance
THE DELHI government is planning to kick off the nursery admissions process for 2018 a year in advance, so that officials and schools get ample time to come out with guidelines and rules beforetheapplicationprocessstarts.
“We plan to take the entire process online and make it centralised. The plan is to ask schools to decide their admission criteria in the beginning of the year and update us in April. We will then encode these for each school based on their location, and make a centralised application process which is transparent,” a government official said.
The nursery admissionsprocess in Delhi is regulated by the government to an extent. Most schools are allowed to decide the criteria on which they will admit students, provided the criteria are non-discriminatory.
This year, the government ordered 293 private unaided schools built on government land to give priority to children who live within a 1-6 km radius of the school during admission, as the clause is part of their land allotment letters.
The remaining 1,400 schools are free to decide their own criteria. The most common criteria assigned by schools are distance from school (neighbourhood), sibling studying in the same school, parents being alumni, and girl child/first child.
“Each school’s criteria will be encoded separately. If a school has points for single parents, they will be added to that school’s profile only. Neighbourhood points and criteria will be decided based on the GPS location of the school. The school will still have the autonomy to decide its criteria and give points accordingly but the process will be made easier for parents as they will not have to fill out multiple forms and run from one school to another,” the official added.
The application process for students from economically weaker sections was centralised by the government last year. Glitches such as wrong GPS tag assigned to a school and wrong information uploaded were reported. But the official said, “If any problems are pointed out, we can always correct them. This is why we want to start in April.”