Academic Planning and Monitoring for Quality:
The current practice of academic planning for school education is largely a 'top down' annual exercise. Its focus is on how teaching time should be allocated for teaching of subject content over the year, and stipulating other activities that will be conducted in schools. Typically, this is done by SCERTs or the Directorates/Departments of Education, and presecribed uniformly for all schools in the state. The importance of school-level planning was emphasised by the Kothari Commission when it underscored the need for each school to prepare an 'institutional plan' and evolve a 'development programme spread over a period of time'.
To be meaningful, academic planning has to be done in a participative manner by heads and teachers. One component of planning will include augmentation and improvement of the physical resources of the school. The second is to address the diverse needs of students and to identify the inputs and academic support that the school needs in order to respond to these needs. The planning exercise is an important process through which schools can enlist the involvement and support of the larger community in the education of children. This includes village education committees and other statutory bodies. Micro planning, which includes village-level mapping of school participation (non-enrolled children, attendance patterns, children with special needs, etc.), as well as identification of human resources, allows the school to plan on a more realistic basis for every child. In order to have more independence at the school level, both at the stage of planning and at the stage of implementation, it is necessary that financial allocations permit greater flexibility regarding schemes and norms, and also greater transparency and accountability of budget allocations and expenditure.
There is a need to prepare the system to engage in more extensive and genuine planning from below, rather than only applying the arithmetic of unit costs for programmes determined at the state or national centres. Only then can 'autonomy' and 'choice' of schools and teachers, as well as the responsibility of the school towards the needs of children, become substantive. A broad framework for planning upwards, beginning with schools identifying focus areas, with subsequent consolidation at the cluster and block levels, could create a genuinely decentralised districtlevel planning. Setting targets, planning for and being responsible for them would then become feasible at all these levels.
