Bangalore-based teaching professionals’ assessment and certifications company, Centre for Teacher Accreditation (CENTA) (estd.2014) in association with EducationWorld (EW) and Reliance Foundation, has launched the sixth edition of the CENTA TPO 2020 (Teaching Professionals’ Olympiad). The competition is a fully online international competition with MCQ-based questions.

Supporting professional development for the teaching community, CENTA assesses and certifies teachers on various technical, professional and core competencies based on CENTA’s specially designed framework of assessment standards. Associated with 200,000 teachers from 6,000 locations within the country, the company’s ‘MyCENTA’ online community provides teachers a platform to share experiences with peers and access free structured, self-paced learning content to improve different teaching competencies.

As part of its initiative to provide teachers with a broader perspective of the educational environment in the country, CENTA hosted a webinar to discuss the latest EW India School Rankings 2020-21 and the role of teachers. Representing EW India School Rankings 2020-21 — the world’s largest field survey of K-12 schools — was Bhavin Shah, CEO, EducationWorld. Bhavin Shah explained how the two most important parameters of the EW India School Rankings were connected to the teaching community.

“We consider teachers to be the pillars of the education system and important shareholders in the schooling system. School managements need to realise  teachers are their ‘intellectual property’ (IP) and a teacher’s impact on the student is far beyond the academic results alone. Thus with regards to the EW India School Rankings, of the 14 scientifically designed parameters that determine a school’s rankings, ‘Teacher welfare and development’ and ‘Competence of faculty’ remain two of most important criteria. Schools who score well on these parameters are indicative of a robust school mechanism that parents can trust,” said Bhavin Shah.

Ruing the fact that the teacher community’s achievements remains one of the least recognised in the country, he stressed on the need for teachers to continuously enhance their professional qualifications and also record it to ensure recognition. “EW has been the torchbearer committed to profiling and raising public awareness about the teaching community’s achievements,” he added.  

Ramya Venkatraman, founder and CEO, CENTA spoke about how teacher competencies are going to play a big role once the New Education Policy is enforced. She also spoke at length about CENTA’s aim to make teaching an aspirational profession for both new and existing teachers and bring about a fundamental improvement in the quality of education.

“We feel that a school should be seen more on the basis of the quality of their teachers and not only through other visible parameters like infrastructure etc. When teacher competency becomes important and the teaching community gets recognised, it leads to a virtuous cycle where more teachers are motivated to voluntarily improve their competencies and look at teaching as a valid profession. We have been seeing this happening and believe the large number of teachers (200,000) associated with CENTA will in turn impact the 15 million children they are connected to,” added Ramya Venkatraman.

The webinar was attended by school principals, teachers and educators from within the country and even outside. Already recognised in India, the CENTA certification is gaining recognition internationally too thus allowing the teaching community to access overseas job opportunities too.

Watch the webinar recording here: