In complete sync with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2022, Odisha's Higher Education Department will be offering a four-year integrated teacher education programme (ITEP) via 11 government degree colleges and three model degree colleges. This will commence from the academic session 2023-2024.
Principal Secretary of the department Saswat Mishra wrote a letter to the higher education institutes (HEIs) in which she mentioned that the colleges will be running ITEP in the regular mode from the next academic session onwards as opposed to the two-year Bachelor of Education (BEd) course. For now, the BEd courses in these colleges are running in a self-financing mode.
While the 11 degree colleges include eight autonomous colleges like BJB, SB Women's and Vikram Dev College, the model colleges to offer the course are those in Rayagada, Malkangiri and Nabarangpur. Since the integrated course will commence only in 2023-24, they have been instructed to admit fresh students for the BEd programme till 2022-23 only and not beyond.
It may be noted that this is one of the major mandates of the NEP related to teacher education as teacher engagement from the year 2030 will be only through ITEP. It will be the minimum degree qualification for school teachers.
It was in October 2021 that the Ministry of Education had notified about the ITEP, a dual-major bachelor's degree offering BA-BEd, BSc-BEd and BCom-BEd. This integrated course will be beneficial to students since they will save one year as they get to complete the course in four years compared to the five years the present BEd-MEd system requires.
It was also decided by the state government that BEd courses will continue to be offered in 16 standalone Teacher Education Institutions (TEIs), out of which, five of these institutes will also be offering MEd in addition to the bachelor's programme. The Secretary has asked all these colleges to apply for recognition of these courses to NCTE (National Council for Teacher Education) by May 31.
In the 2020-21 session, the recognition of 15 TEIs in Odisha was withdrawn by NCTE due to a lack of an adequate number of faculty members in the institutions. Last year, NCTE allowed them to run the BEd and MEd courses with a reduced number of students (maximum 50).
