Follow us
The central government has notified the New RTE Act, that allows schools to detain failed children in classes 5 and 8. Check out the complete details of this act on the page below.
New RTE Act NotifiedNew RTE Act Notified: The Central Government has notified the New RTE Act, by amending the Right of Education and Compulsory Education Rules, 2010 which allows states to conduct regular exams for children in classes 5 and 8 and hold them back to schools if they are detained. The new rule will enable children to repeat their classes but says, “no child shall be expelled" up to class 8. This change comes after 5 five years to include the 2019 RTE Act. As per the new RET Act, the states will conduct the regular examinations for the children in classes 5 and 8 at the end of the academic year, if any children fail that exam, then they have additional instruction and a chance of appearing for the regular examination after 2 months.
If any candidate failed in the additional exam, then they might be detained in classes 5 or 8. However, the RTE Act also emphasizes that “no child shall be expelled from any school” until they complete their minimum class 8. For this, the principals of the respective schools should be required to maintain a list of failed children, monitor them personally, and identify learning gaps in inputs to the children for their studies. A few states have already decided to follow this amendment in the act, listed as:
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Madhya Pradesh
- Jharkhand
- Karnataka
- Delhi
These states have already detained children of classes 5 and 8. However, Karnataka to hold public exams for classes 5, 8, and 11 was scrapped by the Karnataka government in March 2024. Meanwhile, some states such as Kerala are against conducting exams for classes 5 and 8.
The RTE Act originally had a “no detention policy” that can be imposed on the country-wide ban on the practice of making elementary school children who fail the exams repeat the same class. This means that children could not be detained in the same class until class 8 even if they failed. For this, The Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) was held in 2015. Of these 23 states, out of 28 states in the country had called for a ‘’no detention policy”.
