Understanding the Perception of Students Toward the New National Education Policy as a Step to Attain Sustainable Development Goals in Education Through Responsible Leadership

The 34-year-old National Education Policy is set to be replaced by the New National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. It aims to universalize education from preschool to the secondary level. NEP-2020 was framed to achieve UNSDG Goal 4 for inclusive and equitable quality education along with promoting lifelong learning opportunities which is an example of a responsible leadership initiative, taken to make the Indian education system in line with the needs and requirements of the global competition and provide sustainable growth opportunities for individuals. With such a major reform initiated, that requires leadership support at all hierarchy levels for successful implementation, this research aims to understand the perception of the students toward the NEP-2020. This becomes relevant as they will be directly impacted by the changes made in the present education system. An open-ended questionnaire was designed and responses were obtained from the students in Higher Education Institutes in Bangalore, India. Sentiment Analysis and Topic Modeling, the two most used techniques in Text Analytics were used for analysis. The results depict that respondents are very well aware of the NEP-2020 and they have positive sentiments toward it. They believe that it will bring flexibility to the education system and will become a driving force toward achieving interest and desire to learn. Moreover, they believe that successful implementation will be slightly challenging without the intervention of a responsible leadership team.