Kendriya Vidyalaya starts taking 5-yr-olds

Both the Kendriya Vidyalayas of Salt Lake inaugurated their preprimary section earlier this week. The development comes in the wake of the rollout of the National Education Policy (NEP).

According to the new rules framed in NEP 2020, the 10+2 schooling format would be changed to 5+3+3+4. Thus students would be required to spend the initial five years in primary school. These five years would consist of three years of preprimary (Balvatika), followed by classes 1 and 2.

Kendriya Vidyalaya 1 Salt Lake introduced Balvatika 3 to Salt Lake on Monday. Parents and students had started to gather in front of the school pretty early in the morning. The Balvatika kids were later escorted carefully by the teachers and staff members to the newly done-up special room for the kids

The inauguration took place at the Labony Estate school in the presence of principal Sudhanya Karan, vice-principal Sangram Banerjee, class teacher Reshma Khatun, headmaster Partha Basu and a few faculty members. After a short ribbon-cutting ceremony, the students of Balvatika were gifted a red rose each by the principal, the vice-principal, the headmaster and the class teacher. "We have introduced only Balvatika 3 in KV 1, Salt Lake. There are other branches of Kendriya Vidyalaya that have already introduced and started both Balvatika 1 and Balvatika 2. We hope to build upon this initiative to ensure that the NEP 2020 is implemented successfully in future," said the principal.

The lowest age of admission to KV so far was six-plus and the lowest class was Class 1. "As a pilot project, two schools, KV Ballygunge and KV Cossipore, were asked to start all three classes of Balvatika last year. This year, among the 64 KVs in the Calcutta region, those who can manage to open a room have been asked to open Balvatika 3," said the headmaster.

"There was a lot of demand from parents for a pre-primary section at KV. These children admitted to the course will go to Class I and not have to fill up an admission form again," said headmaster Basu. Thirty students have joined in this batch.

The room assigned for Balvatika is decorated with coloured wallpapers and equipped with educational kit like alphabet blocks and number blocks required to impart training in the playway method, which will be followed for this age group. "There is no textbook," a teacher said.

Two teachers and a caregiver have been recruited for this class. "For the first week, we are allowing parents to come to the classroom to drop off the children," said a teacher. The students seemed content at being received by the principal in a student-friendly environment. Just one girl among the 30 students was unwilling to stay on. She started wailing to go back to her father and had to be pacified by the attending teachers. "Handling children of this age group is a new experience for us. We will have to get used to more if Balvatika 1 and 2 get introduced in our school as that would bring the age of admission down to three-plus years," smiled a teacher.

Classes will take place Monday to Friday. "The children will stay only for three hours, from 9am. And there is no compulsion to wear school uniform," Basu said.