The seventh annual EW ECE conference attracted over 300 professionals and educationists from across the country who discussed best practices and deliberated on focusing government and public attention to the importance of providing pre-primary education to India’s 164 million children in the 0-5 age group – Summiya Yasmeen

Staged at Bangalore’s smart ITC Gardenia Hotel on January 21, the seventh EducationWorld Early Childhood Education National Conference 2017 attracted over 300 early childhood care and education (ECCE) professionals, academics, principals and teachers from the country’s top-ranked pre-primaries. For over eight hours they discussed best practices and deliberated ways and means to draw government and public attention to the importance of providing age-appropriate ECCE to all of India’s 164 million children in the 0-5 age group.

In his welcome address, Dilip Thakore, publisher-editor of EducationWorld (estb.1999), explained the rationale for converting the hitherto global conference into a national conference this year. “The quality and practice gap between pre-primary education in the developed OECD and even South-east Asian countries and India is so wide, that a substantial number of teachers and principals complained that the foreign experts invited from developed countries were talking above their heads. Consequently, from this year onward we will stage annual national conferences that will discuss and debate best ECCE practices feasible in the Indian subcontinent”, said Thakore, while applauding the efforts of the country’s 300,000 private pre-primaries for impacting the critical importance of ECCE upon parents communities and providing enabling early years education to 10 million children countrywide.

The day-long conference, sponsored by Navneet Education Ltd, EduSports Pvt. Ltd, Infniti Modules Pvt. Ltd, and Afairs Media & Exhibitions, featured an interactive workshop, two panel discussions and an open debate. The interactive workshop — ‘Teacher education and professional development in the 21st century: Are you ready for the new National Education Policy — which kicked off the days programme, was conducted by Dr. Jeremy Williams and Amrita Randhawa of the Asian International College India, a subsidiary of the UK-based Busy Bees Group which owns over 400 highly-respected pre-primaries in the UK and South-east Asia. The workshop attracted enthusiastic participation from the audience in the packed auditorium.

Subsequently, the first panel debated ‘Designing low-cost/affordable models for ECCE’. The knowledgeable panelists included Nilesh Nimkar, founder-director of the Quality Education Support Trust, a Palghar (Maharashtra)-based NGO which has provided early childhood education to 20,000 underprivileged children in rural Maharashtra; Priya Krishnan, CEO of Founding Years Learning Solutions Pvt. Ltd which has promoted the KLAY and Little Company group of day care centres and preschools in seven cities countrywide; Fatema Agarkar, co-founder and CEO of KA EduAssociates, a Mumbai-based education management company; and Vishesh Parnerkar of FSG, a US-based non-profit social impact consultancy firm.

The second equally stellar panel comprised Swati Popat Vats, founder-president of the Early Childhood Association of India which has a membership of 3,000 preschools countrywide; Lina Ashar, founder-director of the Kangaroo Kids chain of 116 owned and franchised preschools and K-12 schools; Niranjanaradhya V.P, fellow and programme head for Universalisation of School Education Programme at Centre for Child and the Law of the National Law School of India University, Bangalore; Ambarish Rai, national convenor of the RTE Forum, a coalition of over 10,000 NGOs, educationists and social activists countrywide and Prriety Gosalia, CEO of Leapbridge Education which runs a group of preschools in Pune and Mumbai. For over 60 minutes, they debated whether ‘The RTE Act should include preschool education’. The panel discussions which included 30-minute Q&A sessions were followed with an Open Debate on ‘Exposing children to new technologies: Boon or bane’.

Moreover, interspersed between the panel discussions, was the EW India Preschool Rankings Awards ceremony during which the countrys best pre-primaries from 16 cities, which topped the EW India Preschool Rankings 2016 (see EW December 2016), were presented trophies and certificates of standing (see p.80).