The National Curriculum Framework 2005 document outlines the process undertaken to revise the national school curriculum in India. A National Steering Committee and 21 National Focus Groups composed of experts were formed to research and prepare position papers on various curricular areas and reforms. Their work was informed by nationwide consultations, including with teachers, NGOs, and over 2000 public responses. The framework emphasizes making learning more child-centered, connected to life outside school, and shifting away from rote memorization. It calls for reforms across subject areas as well as systemic reforms to assessment and teacher training.

1. National Curriculum Framework
2005

2. The Mandate
 Charter of NCERT envisages a special place for
designing curriculum.
 NCERT expected to review school curriculum as
a regular activity ensuring the highest
standards of rigour
 National Policy on Education, 1986 assigns a
special role to NCERT in preparing and
promoting a National Curriculum Framework.

3. NCF structures
 National Steering Committee set up
 NSC comprised 35 members including scholars,
principals and teachers, NGO representatives and
NCERT faculty, representatives of MHRD, Govt. of
India
 NSC supported by 21 National Focus Groups
to prepare well researched Position Papers
 NFGs chaired by renowned scholars and
practitioners

4. National Focus Groups
 Curricular Areas:
 Science, Mathematics, Indian Languages, English, Social
Sciences, Art, Dance, Theatre and Music, Physical
Education & Health
 Systemic Reform:
 Aims of Education, Systemic Reform for Curricular
Change, Curriculum, syllabus and textbooks, Teacher
Education for curriculum renewal, Examination reforms,
Work & Education, Educational Technology, Heritage
Crafts
 National Concerns
 Problems of SC/ST children, Gender, Problems of children
with special needs, Peace Education

5. Wide ranging deliberations
 Country wide consultations/ interactions with classroom
practitioners, scholars of the country
 Rural teachers
 State Governments/ Local Self Governments
 Voluntary Agencies
 Principals of private schools
 Unprecedented media debates
 Advertisements inviting suggestions placed in 28
national and regional dailies
 Over 2000 responses received

6. A mother‟s response…
“Our syllabus gets more massive and moves beyond the
teaching capacity of the teachers so they rush through the
contents with tedious methodology. Students cannot meet the
attention span requirement in the classrooms and either fail at
comprehension or blank out into daydreaming. Newer topics of
many different subjects are covered even before the previous
ones have been chewed over. The burden of the syllabus is then
passed on to the parents or tuition classes. Little children
burdened with loads of „education‟ on their shoulders trip from
school to tuition classes, bypassing childhood. A section of
students study harder and harder to beat each other to the top
slot. Majority of the students are hounded by parents and
teachers to study harder and become stressed, some requiring
even clinical treatment.”

7.  Perspectives
 Learning and
knowledge
 Curricular areas,
school stages and
assessment
 School and
classroom
environment
 Systemic reform

8. Perspectives
 Provides the historical backdrop; recalls NPE
statement on curricular framework NPE
 Revolves around the question of curriculum load
on children
 Information often confused for knowledge.
 Tendency to teach everything arises from our lack of
faith in children‟s creative instincts.
 Demand for inclusion of new topics/subjects results in
disjointed syllabi; encyclopaedic textbooks, and
traumatic exams.

9. Perspectives
 Proposes guiding principles for curriculum
development
 Connecting knowledge to life outside the school
 Ensuring that learning shifts away from rote
methods
 Enriching curriculum so that it goes beyond
textbooks
 Making examinations flexible

10. Perspectives
 Describes the social context of education - hierarchies of
caste, economic status, gender relations that influence
access and participation.
 Cautions against pressures to commodify schools and
application of market related concepts to schools and
school quality
 Discusses the aims of education
 Building commitment to democratic values of equality,
justice, freedom, concern for others‟ well being,
secularism and respect for human dignity and rights.

11. Learning
and
Knowledge

12. Learning and Knowledge
 Focuses on the child as an active learner
 Primacy to children‟s experiences, their voices and
their participation
 Need for adults to change their perception of children
as passive receivers of knowledge
 Children can be active participants in the construction
of knowledge
 The school should recognize the innate ability of each
child to construct his/her own knowledge, and the fact
that every child comes to school with a fund of pre-
knowledge.

13. Learning and Knowledge
 Therefore children must be encouraged to ask
questions, relate what they are learning in schools to
things happening outside and answer in their own
words rather than by memorizing.
 Recognizes the need for developing an enabling and
non-threatening environment
 Emphasizes that gender, caste, class, religion and
minority status should not constrain participation in
experiences provided in school

14. Learning and Knowledge
 Highlights the value of interaction with:
 environment,
 peers,
 older people to enhance learning;
 Learning tasks must be designed to enable children to
seek out knowledge from sites other than textbooks.
 Need therefore to move away from rigid lesson planning
to planning and designing activities that challenge
children to think and try out what they are learning.

15. Curricular
areas,
school
stages and
assessment

16. Curricular Areas, School Stages and
Assessment
 Recommends significant changes in Language,
Maths, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences
 Overall view to reduce stress, make education
more relevant, meaningful.

17. Curricular Areas, School Stages and
Assessment
 Language:
 Makes renewed attempt to implement 3-language
formula
 Emphasis on home language as medium of instruction
 Curriculum should promote multi-lingual proficiency;
can happen only if learning builds a sound language
pedagogy of the mother tongue.
 Focus on language as an integral part of every subject:
reading, writing, listening and speaking contribute to
child‟s progress in all curricular areas and must be the
basis for curriculum planning.

18. Curricular Areas, School Stages and
Assessment
 Mathematics
 Succeeding in Maths should be seen as the right of every child
 A majority of children have a sense of fear and failure of
Maths: they give up early.
 Curriculum is disappointing to this non-participating majority,
but also to talented minority – it offers them no challenges.
 Textbooks are replete with problems, exercises and methods
of evaluation which are repetitive and mechanical
 Focus on child‟s ability to think and reason
 Visualize and handle abstractions
 Formulate and solve problems

19.  Science
 Should be recast to enable children to examine and
analyze everyday experiences
 Environment Education should become part of every
subject – thru‟ wide range of activities involving
outdoor project work

20. Curricular Areas, School Stages and
Assessment
 Social Sciences
 Recognizes disciplinary markers so that content is not
eroded, but also emphasizes integration of themes,
such as water water
 Recommends paradigm shift to study social sciences
from the perspective of marginalized groups
 Gender justice and sensitivity to issues of tribal and
socially deprived groups, and minority sensibilities
must inform all sectors of social sciences.

21. Curricular Areas, School Stages and
Assessment
 Draws attention to four other areas:
 Art Education
 Covers four major spheres of music, dance, visual
arts and theatre.
 Focus on interactive approaches, not instruction –
because goal is to promote aesthetic awareness
and enable children to express themselves in
different forms
 Health and Physical Education
 Success in school depends on nutrition and well
planned physical activities.

22. Curricular Areas, School Stages and
Assessment
 Education for Peace
 As a precondition for national development in view
of growing tendency towards intolerance and
violence.
 Work and Education
 Work alone can create a social temper.
 Work should be infused in all subjects from
primary stage upwards
 Agencies offering work opportunities outside the
school should be formally recognised.

23. School and classroom environment

24. School and classroom environment
 Critical pre-requisites for improved performance
 Availability of minimum infrastructure and material
facilities
 Support for planning a flexible daily schedule.
 Focus on nurturing an enabling environment
 Revisits traditional notions of discipline
 Discusses need for providing space to parents and
community

25. School and classroom environment
 Discusses other learning sites and resources
 Texts & books
 Libraries, tools and laboratories
 Media and ICT
 Addresses the need for plurality of material and teacher
autonomy/ professional independence to use such
material.

26. Systemic reform

27. Systemic Reform
 Covers need for academic planning for monitoring
quality
 Reaffirms faith in local self government
 Proposes systematic activity mapping of functions
appropriate at relevant levels of local self
government
 Simultaneously ensuring financial autonomy on
the basis of the funds-must-follow-functions
principle.

28. Systemic Reform
 Teacher education should focus on developing
professional identity of the teacher
 Examination reforms to reduce psychological stress,
particularly on children in class X and XII
 Recommends changing the typology of questions
so that reasoning and creative abilities replace rote
learning

29. Udega to saaton aasmaano ki khabar le
aayega.
Udaaoge to chhat pe jaakar baith jayega.
(Were she to fly she would bring tidings from
across the infinite skies;
Were you to make her fly, she would but
confine herself to sitting on the rooftop)

31. Future Steps
 Development of syllabi and textbooks based on the
following considerations:
 Appropriateness of topics and themes for relevant
stages of children‟s development
 Continuity from one level to the next
 Pervasive resonance of the values enshrined in the
Constitution of India in the organisation of
knowledge in all subjects
 Inter-disciplinary and thematic linkages between
topics listed for different school subjects, which
fall under discrete disciplinary areas

32. Future Steps
 Linkages between school knowledge in different
subjects and children‟s everyday experiences
 Infusion of environment related knowledge and
concern in all subjects and at all levels
 Sensitivity to gender, caste and class parity,
peace, health and needs of children with
disabilities
 Integration of work related attitudes and values in
every subject and at all levels
 Need to nurture aesthetic sensibility and values

33. Future Steps
 Linkage between school and college syllabi; avoid
overlapping
 Using the potential of media and new information
technology in all subjects
 Encouraging flexibility and creativity in all areas of
knowledge and its construction by children

34. Learning and Knowledge
 Highlights the value of interaction with:
 environment,
 peers,
 older people to enhance learning; grandpa
 Learning tasks must be designed to enable children to
seek out knowledge from sites other than textbooks.
 Need therefore to move away from the „Herbartian‟
lesson plan to preparing plans and activities that
challenge children to think and try out what they are
learning.