The widening gap between teacher expectations and institutional support

A state that keeps adding to a teacher’s job description without adding to a teacher’s support structure is not reforming education but transferring the cost of its own institutional failures onto the people least positioned to absorb them. The Central Board of Secondary Education issued a circular on February 20, mandating biannual mental health and social-emotional learning training for all school staff in compliance with a Supreme Court order. At the same time, a Parliamentary Standing Committee deadline of March 2026 to fill vacancies in centrally administered schools and NCTE posts is poised to lapse without resolution, even as the national vacancy count stands at nearly ten lakh. The gap between what India asks of its teachers and what it gives them has never been more formally documented or more quietly ignored.

A structural failure

The Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) 2024-25 confirms that the system is still losing children at the secondary stage even as foundational gains accumulate below that stage. The Union Budget announced the expansion of 50,000 Atal Tinkering Labs and 15,000 Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming and Comics (AVGC) Content Creator Labs across Indian schools. However, States with the highest pupil-teacher ratios, several of which exceed the prescribed norm of 30:1 at the secondary level, are also the states where in-service teacher training coverage remains the weakest.

The National Council for Teacher Education, the body responsible for setting teacher education standards, has made no permanent appointments since 2019, with 54% of Group A posts, 43% of Group B posts and 89% of Group C posts lying vacant as of June 2025. Five years into the National Education Policy 2020, this is not an administrative footnote but a structural indictment.

Prof. Namita Ranganathan, faculty at the Central Institute of Education, University of Delhi, has argued that teachers function as action researchers, innovating constantly within their own classrooms but given no institutional forum to share what they discover. Sanjay Kumar, Secretary of the Department of School Education and Literacy, has noted in recent public statements that classroom transaction has fundamentally changed and that competency-building must replace information delivery. Both observations are accurate and neither is new, which is precisely why the question worth pressing is why neither has been institutionally acted upon in the five years since the policy was announced.

The most urgent thread concerns social-emotional learning (SEL). Prof. Ranganathan has argued that SEL should function as a continuous developmental flow from pre-primary to Class 12, facilitated not by specialist counsellors but by class teachers trained as first-response providers, yet the same CBSE directive mandates a counsellor-to-student ratio of 1:500 alongside biannual training for all staff, a standard that remains far from ground reality in most government school settings. Bachelor of Education (B.Ed) programmes have begun this work by replacing rigid lesson delivery with reflective diaries and practicum-based theory building, but the older teaching workforce that staffs the majority of government school classrooms has been largely left out of this transition.

What the pattern shows

The Right to Education Act’s 25% reservation for economically weaker sections showed how structural inclusion without pedagogical preparation produces friction: reimbursement disputes that remain judicially contested, administrative evasions documented in state after state, and classroom bias rooted in unexamined caste and class attitudes. In September 2025, the Supreme Court issued notice to the Centre on Tamil Nadu’s plea that the Union government had not released its share of RTE reimbursement funds since 2021, leaving the State unable to pay approximately ₹315 crore owed to private schools for EWS admissions. NEP 2020 risks repeating this pattern at a far larger scale.

Reading levels at the foundational stage have improved: government school students in Class 3 who could read a simple text stood at 16.3% in 2022 and reached 23.4% by 2024, according to ASER 2024, and the NIPUN Bharat programme deserves a fair share of that credit. At the secondary level the picture is less settled, with a dropout rate of 8.2% in 2024-25, down from 10.9% the previous year. Yet 9.7% of boys are still leaving school against 6.6% of girls, absorbed into informal labour markets before Class 12.

Secondary education demands not only subject expertise but adolescent engagement, mentorship and emotional scaffolding, and these are precisely the domains where teachers have received the least structured support under NEP’s rollout. The Parliamentary Committee’s review of NCTE finds that teacher preparation is sliced into stage-specific programmes designed without multi-grade classrooms in mind, and that the draft NCTE Regulations 2025 threaten to deepen rather than resolve this by locking teachers into specialisations too narrow for the schools they will actually serve.

Monthly district-level reflective forums linked to ASER and the National Achievement Survey (NAS) data, where teachers share social-emotional learning strategies, inclusion practices and classroom innovations, could build the institutional culture of exchange that in-service lectures have consistently failed to produce. Teacher well-being must be governed by measurable standards rather than aspirational language that states interpret at will. The tinkering labs announced in Budget 2026 will produce genuine pedagogical innovation only if teachers are given space to experiment and share findings rather than receive another directive from above.

The February 2026 CBSE circular makes the ask of India’s teachers official. What remains unofficial, unbudgeted and unacknowledged is the reciprocal obligation of the state. A policy that is serious about outcomes must first be serious about the people it asks to deliver them.

(Rahul Verma is an independent researcher and sociology educator.)

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