The Maharashtra government is working on revising the age criteria for school admissions. Effective from the 2024-25 academic year, children aspiring for nursery admissions must be a minimum of three years old, adjusting from the prior practice that permitted children who turned three by December to enrol, leading to admissions of two-and-a-half-year-old children.
The state government and the Women and Child Development Ministry are jointly crafting the new admission policy. Notably, the Early Childhood Association (ECA) has been vociferous in advocating for this change. According to TOI reports, Members of the ECA emphasised that Maharashtra remained an outlier in not adjusting its entry age, resulting in children commencing first grade at the age of five years. It claimed that such a delay could impede the developmental aspects crucial for early learners, including language acquisition and social skills.
The Early Childhood Association had written to governor Ramesh Bais seeking his intervention to ask the state government to declare three years as the minimum age for entering kindergarten.The existing Maharashtra government resolution requires a child who is newly enrolled in school to complete three years by December 31 in that particular year. Recently, Karnataka altered the minimum school age to three.