New Delhi: In line with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020’s push for vocational education and hands-on learning into secondary education, educators and policymakers have called for a rethink on an exam-heavy school system.
They opined that spending the majority of their time in preparing for exams leaves school students little time to explore skills and practice alternative pathways to success.
During a panel discussion titled “NEP@Work: Secondary Education and Skilling” at Charcha 2026, government officials, education practitioners and young people discussed how schools can better prepare students for the transition from education to work.
The NEP 2020 recommends integrating vocational education into mainstream school education from the early years, with students gaining exposure to hands-on skills and vocational courses from the middle-school stage and greater choice of such courses in Classes 9-12.
Soumya Jain, founder and CEO of iTeach Schools, a non-profit organization providing free education to students from low-income families, said, “Basically, out of 16 waking hours, students are spending 10-12 hours reading, writing and preparing for tests. That’s not okay.”
Jain added: “Because our Class 10 exam is literally just a written exam, by the time you reach Class 9, all of that [practical learning] goes out the window.”
He also pointed to the increasingly abstract nature of subjects such as mathematics in the secondary years. “Math is so abstract. Algebra and geometry are so abstract,” he said, arguing that students can end up repeatedly practicing proofs rather than applying mathematical concepts in practical settings.
Integrating skilling into school curriculum, Jain said it could provide students with “different ways to express themselves” and show them that doing well in an examination is not “the whole soul of one’s existence”. He said schools should also measure creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, confidence and joy.
Emphasizing the importance of the secondary stage, including Classes 9 to 12, Dr Nisha Dhawan, president and CEO of Empower Foundation, said this is the stage when young people begin falling out of the education system.
“We need to double click on secondary school education,” Dhawan said, pointing to falling enrolment and barriers that particularly affect adolescent girls, including early marriage, menstruation-related challenges, lack of adequate facilities and difficulties in safely travelling to school.
She said the 10-24 age group represents the “make or break years” of a young person’s trajectory and called for sustained investment in adolescents, particularly girls.
Pranjal Patil, state project director (SPD) and additional director (Vocational), Samagra Shiksha, Directorate of Education, GNCT of Delhi, said one of the biggest challenges was changing parents’ attitudes towards vocational careers, given the social hierarchy around conventional academic courses.
“Changing parents’ minds about why this is also a viable career for their child is a very difficult social phenomenon. In our country, we still have this colonial mindset that one is better and another is lower,” she said.