Dr. Manasvi M. Kamat
The HRD Ministry announced fresh affiliation norms for the schools under the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) during the last weekend. The purpose of the new edition was for a focus on making quality education affordable and ensuring that school campuses are safe. Since the CBSE works as a model for nearly 28 state school boards, implications of the proposed changes in inspection and approval system of schools will be far-reaching and pervasive.
The new norms precede the announcement of the revised New Education Policy and are an indicator of the changes likely to come in the school education sector.
The CBSE as on July 2018 oversees functioning of 20783 schools in India and 220 in 25 foreign countries with over 1.9 crore students and more than 10 lakh teachers. In all, as many as 1,123 KVs, 2,953 government/aided schools, 15,837 independent schools, 592 Jawahar Novodaya Vidyalayas and 14 central Tibetan schools will be impacted with the new norms.
While announcing new norms the HRD Minister has indicated that intention of this exercise is to ensure speed, transparency, hassle-free procedures and enhance ease of doing business with the board. Currently for issuing recognition for CBSE schools are granted permission under the Right to Education Act after the state education administration has verified various certificates to be obtained from local bodies, revenue and cooperative departments. The new norms mandate to submit only two documents at the time of applying for affiliation instead of 12-14 documents being submitted earlier. The first document would be vetted by head of district education administration validating building safety, sanitation, land ownership and the second would be a self-affidavit by the school pledging its adherence to the norms laid down for its purpose.
There was a need to update the existing norms as they were archaic and three decades old. The affiliation norms that are currently in position were first made in 1988 and last modified only in 2012. The new norms have emphasised on reducing paperwork and other formalities in starting a CBSE school by 75%. The new systems take the process online to speed up the approvals by reducing pendency and duplicity of work between central and state governments. The second reform is about physical verification.
Rather than emphasising physical visits, the focus will now be on assessments of learning outcome. Inspection of schools is now expected to be more academic and quality oriented emphasising on academic excellence innovations, capacity of teachers and teacher training, inclusive practices, etc. Moreover they will be decentralised and conducted by the district education officer.
On satisfactory inspection report, CBSE will issue a Letter of Intent to the school indicating its intention to affiliate. The school will then be expected to fulfil all conditions laid down under the post-affiliation process, such as recruitment of qualified teachers, special educator, wellness counsellor, salaries through digital payment, etc. On complying with all these conditions, the school will submit an online commencement certificate latest by 31st March of the given year, based on which, the Board shall confirm affiliation of the school.
The third and major change in the norms is that the schools will now be required to fully disclose the fee structure on their websites and prohibits them from levying any hidden charges failing which the institution can lose it affiliation. The new norms clearly state that fee is to be charged as per the regulation of the appropriate government and fee revision shall be subject to laws, regulations and directions of the appropriate government. Also, for the first time, the new norms encourage schools to promote environmental conservation through harnessing solar energy, rain water harvesting, greening of campus, recycling and segregation of waste, cleanliness on campus, etc. The need for teacher training will now be a formally mandated exercise as the thrust is on achieving academic excellence through mandatory teacher training. Even the Principals and Vice Principals of every school will now be required to undergo two days of mandatory training on an annual basis.
The new regulations will pave a way for about 8,000 applications for opening schools in 2018, some of which were pending for seven or eight years. The new norms will also enable the CBSE to inspect the learning outcome in affiliated schools every five years. In a way, the reform move liberalized the school affiliation system under the CBSE.
The new norms however leave many issues unaddressed. First there was a need to reform the current examination pattern by including more short questions with a problem solving approach rather than rote learning. The new norms also fail to reduce the load of the school bag for children in classes from Std I to IV. Thought could have given to restricting class strength to 30 rather than 40 and above practiced by many private schools. The issue of delayed declaration of XII CBSE results is often causing problems to students seeking admissions in colleges and remains to be seen.
Though educational experts have risen eyebrows over tweaking CBSE’s norms a few months before next year’s general polls, there is no doubt that steps have finally fallen are in the right direction. The revised now will most certainly positively impact existing and future schools by easing procedures and through redirecting their focus towards improving the quality of education. The new liberalised regime of CBSE regulations is thus, most welcome.
