Hyderabad: Schools affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education find themselves in a tricky situation with the deadline for accreditation closing in.
One of the prerequisites for accreditation is the documentation of each and every proceeding and meeting in the school in addition to extensive data about students and infrastructure.
But hardly any school has such documentation or information on students. The Central Board of Secondary Education had notified that schools that do not get accredited will lose their affiliation.
The Central Board of Secondary Education had notified affiliated schools last year through a circular about the School Quality Assessment and Accreditation Scheme (SQAAS).
Schools would have to get themselves accredited under this within three years or lose their affiliation altogether.
In the three-step process, schools would have to send the required details to the CBSE, after which empanelled Peer Assessor Teams (PAT) will visit the schools and make the assessment. The CBSE has listed hundreds of points where the schools need to have the required infrastructure.
In the safety section alone, there are hundreds of infrastructural requirements for physical safety, emotional safety, social safety, emergency preparedness and cyber safety. Among others, schools are required to have disaster management cells and medical history of every student and so forth.
“Schools’ infrastructure is pretty good and can be improved as well. But very few schools have documentation of the minutes of a principal-teachers meeting or an administration-parents meeting. But schools are slowly applying now for the accreditation,” said Dr D. Usha Reddy, chairperson of the Hyderabad Sahodaya Schools Complex, a consortium of schools affiliated to the CBSE.
