District Institutes of Education and Training - Teacher Education

District Institutes of Education and Training: A Comparative Study in Three Indian States
total lack of co-ordination between the DEO Office, BDO and the DIET due to
which DIET plans its programmes according to SIERT calendar, bringing about
minor changes only instead of making them need based (NN diary July 2000).
6.3.2 Who is responsible for monitoring for quality?
Another reason to forge relations with the Education Department is the need to
work out effective systems for evaluating the impact of the training programmes.
Some DIET staff continue to believe that the monitoring of educational quality has
nothing to do with the DIET, but should be done by the Education Department, as
the official inspecting body. This view sees the Education Department as responsible
for identifying training needs from the field and bringing them to the DIET’s
attention, via the Programme Advisory Committee. It is however common
knowledge that this sort of inspection of schools is not taking place, in part because
of the inspectoral culture and also because there are too few inspectors to meet
requirements. Exactly this inconsistency was expressed by DIET staff, for example:
We give training but whether schools are working properly or not is done by
the Development Officer or the District Education Officer. They are not able
to do proper monitoring (RAJ/ UDR TT011 1999).
The DIET is unlikely through the Education Department to get the sort of
feedback from the field that would help them to develop needs-based training. If
it has not substantially developed other means, as for example Surat and Masuda
DIETs had, it delivers programmes without local adaptations. Such training
programmes support the Education Department’s perception of low impact and
relevance in classrooms.
The quality of Education Department monitoring is becoming less of an issue as
Cluster Resource Centres are rolled out, if the DIET makes appropriate links with
them. Under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, many of the Programme Advisory
Committee functions can be more appropriately and fully taken on by continuous
links between the DIET and Cluster Resource Centres rather than occasional
Programme Advisory Committee meetings. Co-ordination between Education
Department and DIET would shift to a focus on creating feedback loops between
the DIET, Cluster Resource Centres and Education Department offices. Here
there may be a role for a Programme Advisory Committee proactively to promote
linkages between DIETs and Cluster Resource Centres, as these have been found
to be weak in the majority of the sample DIETs.
6.3.3 Innovation management: proaction at the DIET level
In Districts where there had been no external programme interventions, officers of
the Education Department had themselves not had detailed and sufficient
DFID 121