NEW DELHI – The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has made a big change to its affiliation bye-laws. From now on, the total built-up carpet area of the school building, not just the amount of land available, will determine how many sections a school can have. This big change in policy is meant to give schools more freedom, especially in cities where land is hard to come by, while also making sure that students have the facilities they need.
Himanshu Gupta, the CBSE Secretary, said that the board has heard a lot from schools and other interested parties about the problems caused by a lack of land. “There are places where there is a severe lack of land availability, which makes it hard for schools to add more sections beyond the allowed limit, even when there is a demand for new admissions,” Gupta said. He also said that schools had a hard time keeping the optimal student-to-section ratio of 1:40 since they were under pressure to accept new students and couldn’t build sections because of land-based restrictions.
The New Norms in Action
According to the new rules, a municipal authority or a licensed architect must check the built-up carpet area of the school building. The land area will now mainly be used to decide what type of school it is (e.g., Branch School, Middle Level School, Secondary Level, and Senior Secondary Level) according to the current affiliation bye-laws.
Another important change is that schools will now be able to have the same number of sections for both the secondary level (Classes 9 and 10) and the senior secondary level (Classes 11 and 12). But in order to keep a good balance of students at all levels, the total number of sections allowed at each of these levels will be limited to one-fourth of the total number of sections running in the school from Balvatika (pre-primary) to Class 10 and Class 12.
This means that even if a school has the space to add more sections, the number of sections at the secondary and senior secondary levels will still be limited based on the institution’s overall strength from its early years. This step is probably meant to make sure that the number of students in each grade is more even and easier to handle.
The CBSE has been slowly changing its rules about how to become affiliated. Recent circulars have also talked about exceptions to the 40-student-per-section limit. For example, up to 45 students can be in a class if they are transferring in the middle of the session and the classroom size and other infrastructural rules are followed. These changes show that the board is trying to deal with real-world problems that schools encounter while also keeping up with safety and quality standards in education.