A three-day workshop on PARAKH and the Holistic Progress Card began at Shiksha Sadan, Sri Vijaya Puram, on September 10, bringing together 100 teachers from across Andaman & Nicobar Islands in both offline and online formats. The programme is a collaborative initiative between NCERT’s Performance Assessment, Review and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development (PARAKH) and the State Institute of Education. Running until September 12, the workshop is part of a national push to align school assessment systems with the vision of the National Education Policy 2020.
The workshop was inaugurated by Sangeeta Chand, Principal of SIE, who set out the vision and objectives of the initiative. In a keynote address delivered virtually, Indrani Bhaduri, CEO and Head of PARAKH at NCERT, emphasized the importance of setting national standards for student assessments, ensuring equivalence across diverse school boards, and moving away from rote memorization. According to her, the role of PARAKH is central in steering India’s education system toward greater fairness and quality.
Sessions were conducted by NCERT faculty members Madurima Pal and Charul Yadav, who are experts in educational assessment and progress card design. They guided participants on how to implement the Holistic Progress Card, a tool designed to capture not just academic achievement but also skills, competencies, and overall development of students. The workshop also saw master trainers from SIE offering training modules to participants, ensuring local expertise is built for long-term continuity.
The hybrid format allowed 50 teachers to attend in person and 50 to participate online, extending access to educators across distant zones of the islands. By building this pool of trained teachers, the programme aims to ensure that insights from the workshop are disseminated back to schools, enabling smoother adoption of the reforms.
The workshop also included the dissemination of results from the PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan 2024-2025 across all educational zones. The findings were shared with teachers to illustrate the current standing of schools and highlight areas that require improvement. Teachers were urged to take these insights seriously and integrate them into their teaching practices.
The focus on the Holistic Progress Card represents a shift in the evaluation of students, ensuring that education is not reduced to exam marks alone but reflects a well-rounded picture of abilities, values, and potential. This approach resonates with the objectives of the National Education Policy, which stresses critical thinking, creativity, and inclusivity in education.
By training teachers directly, the initiative addresses one of the key barriers to reform, lack of awareness and preparation among frontline educators. Teachers are expected to adapt their practices and help their institutions transition toward the new system, thereby embedding assessment reforms in daily classroom operations.
As India moves forward with large-scale education reform, such workshops provide vital platforms for professional development. For Andaman & Nicobar Islands, where geography often limits access to national initiatives, participation in PARAKH marks an important step in ensuring that students and teachers are not left behind in the transition.
The conclusion of this workshop is expected to empower teachers as agents of change, bridging the gap between policy intent and classroom practice, and supporting the creation of an education system better aligned with the aspirations of NEP 2020.
