NEP 2020: Role of National Professional Standards for Teachers in Education System

Our children's futures and, thus, the future of our country are genuinely shaped by their teachers. In India, teachers were the most esteemed members of society due to their noble function. Teachers were only the best and most intelligent. Teachers, were given the resources they required by society to impart their ethics, knowledge, and abilities to students in the best possible way. The quality of teacher education, recruiting, deployment, service conditions, and teacher empowerment are all below par, and as a result, teachers' motivation and quality fall short of expectations. To encourage the best people to pursue careers in teaching, the high regard for educators and the esteemed position of the teaching profession must be reinstated. The National Professional Standards for Teachers (NPST) is a core structural reform introduced under paragraph 5.20 of India's National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. It is designed to replace outdated, tenure-based systems with a rigorous, merit-linked, and competency-based framework. Developed by the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE), the NPST standardizes expectations for what school teachers must know how they perform, and how they advance across their careers. NCTE is working on the detail draft of national professional standard of school teacher along with a framework of teacher mentoring. Here the author provided the background context of such advocacy of professional standard from the perception of continuous professional development and argued that this policy still have several limitations despite positive intensions. And much more debate is needed for fine tuning the implementation framework of policy.