Message from the Hon'ble Education Minister
Education is the key instrument for social and economic transformation and the most important means of nation building. For the past 7 years, the Government of West Bengal under the visionary leadership of Mamata Banerjee, Hon’ble Chief Minister, has been working relentlessly to deliver quality education to the youth and enrich the lives of the children. The primary focus of the School Education Department has been “Education First” and the Department has institutionalized numerous interventions across teacher training, subject enrichment, infrastructure up-gradation, technology enablement to name a few. As a result of its efforts, the state has achieved near 100% literacy rate and enrolment of students across grades.
Given that we are living in an era of IT, Artificial Intelligence, personalized learning, data analytics, the Department of School Education is not far behind. It has envisaged and developed a one of its kind digital portal - Banglar Shiksha to act as a repository of all data related to School Education. This platform, developed by a hand-picked team of experts, aims to streamline all education related processes and data management modules into a single digital symbiotic ecosystem. The platform will enable the Department to track and monitor school performance across pre-determined indicators such that focused interventions can be designed to further improve the quality of education within the state.
This system disseminates information from the ground level i.e. schools to the top level i.e. the decision makers or the Department functionaries whilst maintaining transparency across all levels of governance. The system not only allows monitoring of students and their academic performance, but also monitors the day-to-day activities of the Heads of institution, teachers and other staff of each school. Guardians and parents have also been given access to certain aspects of the system in order to monitor each child’s progress and ensure each child of the State is receiving the highest quality of education possible.
The Department organized a range of field researches at different schools across various districts, to assess the areas of improvement and gather feedback from these schools. All user level feedback has been incorporated into the system to make it more user friendly. A number of sessions were organized to ensure that all users of the system at different levels are familiar with the system usage and objective. All the training sessions held were closely monitored by the Department to confirm that users have a strong understanding of the system and its functionality. Even refresher trainings were organized to ensure that all users have a robust grasp of the portal and its features.
This system has the potential to digitally revolutionize the face of School Education in the State and make the state digitally forward by bringing together various initiatives under one umbrella and making data universally accessible across all geographical grids.
