CBSE revamps norms of affiliation for schools
NEW DELHI : The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has revamped the norms of affiliation for schools, taking the entire affiliation process online to increase transparency, and made it more focused on learning outcomes, in a move that should serve as a confidence boost for the parents of schoolchildren.
Schools will also have to make mandatory fee disclosures and ensure there are no hidden costs for parents to pay, human resource development (HRD) minister Prakash Javadekar said at a press conference on Thursday. And no longer will schools tell their wards where to buy textbooks, uniforms or shoes .
New bye-laws put in place by the CBSE denote a major shift from the highly complex affiliation procedures followed by the board to a simplified system based on the prevention of duplication of processes, Javadekar said.
At present, 20,783 schools in India and 25 other countries, with over 19 million students and a million teachers, are affiliated to the CBSE and follow the curriculum and other standards set by the board, which administers the Class X and Class XII examinations. The bye-laws were first spelled out in 1988 and modified in 2012. Javadekar said that nearly 8,000 applications for affiliation were addressed this year, while 2,000 schools may have actually come up during this time.
One of the salient features of the revised bye-laws is that the duplication of processes at the CBSE and state government level has been done away with, Javadekar said.
For recognition of a school under the Right to Education (RTE) Act and issuing it a no-objection certificate (NOC), the state education administration verifies certificates obtained from local bodies, the revenue department, the cooperatives department, and so on. The CBSE re-verifies them after applications for affiliation to the board are received.
“This is very long-drawn process. Therefore, to prevent this duplication, schools will now be required to submit only two documents at the time of applying for affiliation, instead of 12-14 documents being submitted earlier: one would be a document vetted by the head of district education administration validating all aspects such as building safety, sanitation, land ownership, etc, and another would be a self-affidavit where the school would certify its adherence to fee norms, infrastructure norms, etc,” a statement issued by CBSE said.
As a result of this change, the Board shall not revisit any of the aspects vetted by the state during inspection. Delays due to scrutiny, non-compliance with the rules or any other deficiencies in these documents will be drastically curtailed, it added.
Inspection of schools will now be outcome-based, and more academicand quality-oriented, rather than focussing only on school infrastructure, Javadekar said. This will not only help the Board and the school to track students’ progress over time, but will also identify areas that would need further efforts for improvement.
“The online mode will definitely be very efficient as it will cut short the time and also make things very transparent, objective and uniform. Also, the CBSE has said that committees will be created for timely inspection of the authenticity of what has been mentioned by the schools online. It’s overall a very progressive move,” said Amita Wattal, principal Springdales school.