The National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF) is developed based on the vision of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, and to enable its implementation. The NCF addresses education for the age group 3 to 18 years, across the entire range of diverse institutions in India. This is across the four Stages in the 5+3+3+4 Curricular and Pedagogical restructuring of School Education as envisioned in NEP 2020.
Curriculum Framework
The Curricula across our country must be informed by and be fully responsive to the glorious unity and diversity of India. The imagination of NEP 2020, where institutions and educators are highly empowered – including to develop Curricula – is energized by this diversity and the nurturing of it. States have the Constitutional mandate to provide high-quality education to all children, and their own unique State contexts inform their own approaches to Curricula. A Curriculum Framework must support exactly that – it is a framework to help develop all the diverse Curricula in the country, while enabling consonances and harmony across the country and providing a basis for quality and equity. Thus, a Curriculum Framework provides the guiding principles, goals, structure, and elements for the development of Curricula, informed by which the syllabi, teaching-learning-materials including play materials, workbooks, and textbooks, and assessment methods will be developed by the relevant functionaries, including Teachers, in the States, Boards, and schools.
Objectives of this NCF
The overarching objective of this NCF is to help in positively transforming the school education system of India as envisioned in NEP 2020, through corresponding positive changes in the curriculum including pedagogy. In particular, the NCF aims to help change practices in education and not just ideas; indeed, since the word ‘curriculum’ encapsulates the overall experiences that a student has in school, ‘practices’ do not just refer to curricular content and pedagogy, but also include school environment and culture. It is this holistic overall transformation of the curriculum that will enable us to positively transform overall learning experiences for students.