Academics to leadership: CBSE invites outsiders to monitor schools

New Delhi: Independent bodies will now accredit the 11,000-odd schools affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), on a seven-point assessment chart. The school board has invited ‘Expressions of Interest’ from educational institutions and trusts, NGOs and companies working in the field of education “to undertake the institutional evaluation”.

The Board hopes the exercise will ensure transparency and accountability in its affiliated schools, besides ensuring that students are provided accurate information.
The seven points on which a school's accreditation would be judged are academic process and products, co-scholastic processes and products, infrastructure adequacy and functionality, human resources, management and administration, leadership, and beneficiary satisfaction.
A school's performance on these domains would be assessed at various layers -- peer review for quality assessment, review of stakeholders and beneficiaries to judge satisfaction, checking the school's data-based reports to assess its self-review, and checking any other analysis and overall assessment of the school.

The board has narrowed down assessment to these seven domains as these encompass the entire gamut of issues involved in effective running of a school -- from curriculum planning and the teaching learning process to student assessment and performance, staff recruitment and retention, parent education, alumni involvement, preservation of accounts data, social linkages, academic leadership, quality management, and satisfaction levels of students, parents, teachers as well as the school management.
The move has come at the behest of the Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry, which has been pushing for reforms in the CBSE board and advocated accreditation/rating of its schools to ensure quality education.
While earlier there was talk of a five-point grading system, it was later decided that an accredited/not accredited format would find better acceptability. The plan is to also weed out those schools from the CBSE system which fail to get accreditation within a three-five year window period.

The CBSE had last year sought the opinion of school bodies on the proposed accreditation process and nearly 81 per cent schools had welcomed the idea, with many bringing suggestions to help fine-tune the process. Another 17 per cent schools had expressed interest in the accreditation process but were concerned about it, leaving a mere 2 per cent who were opposed to the proposal.
A further break-up showed 57 per cent schools in North India were all for accreditation, while 14 per cent teachers, 17 per cent parents and 2 per cent of students favoured the move.
Source: Indian Express