In this academic year, 30 Delhi Public Schools will be following the IB curriculum as part of a Memorandum of Cooperation signed by the Delhi Board of Education on Wednesday. The International Baccalaureate for grades IX–XII, 20 of them will be Specialized Schools of Excellence, and for grades 0–8, 10 will be Sarvodaya Vidyalayas.
Registration for Delhi residents in the SSoE will soon start and admission by aptitude test is to take place. In addition, existing Rajkiya Pratibha Vidyalayas and schools of excellence will be integrated into SSoE as they are gradually phased out. The schools will be managed by the Central Board of Secondary Education from now on, other than those taking part in the IB programme. The British School, American Embassy School, Amity Global Schools and several others are among the more than a thousand Delhi government schools who belong to CBSE while there are also over 1000 Indian Private Schools associated with IB.
The SSoE will prepare four areas of study: humanities, 21st century skills, visual arts and science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education.The IB’s primary years curriculum will be offered in the 10 Sarvodaya Schools for students in kindergarten through class V, while the middle years programme will be offered in grades VI through VIII. As part of the 20 SSoE, MYP will be given at class IX-X and XI-XII as well as a diploma and career programme.
The quality of the professionals should be very good, and we think it’s important to train global leaders in this area. An entry test for the IX and XII schools will take place, of which 60 % in VIII and 75 % in X are eligible. No eligibility was established for the Visual Art stream at this time. New teachers are expected to be hired for some specific subject areas, like Hindustani classical music and dance.
An education official said, “The Learning partners are trying to develop tools for the evaluation at DBSE and the details of the same will be released soon,”. The Joint DBSE and IB certification shall be granted to students who have graduated from these schools. The Delhi government claims that as a result of this agreement, more than 400 teachers from Sarvodaya Vidyalayas and 250 teachers from SSoE will participate in IB’s professional development seminars on capacity building and skill upgradation.
In SSoE there is a little concern among the 10 Sarvodaya Vidyalayas as to how they would comply with IB criteria such as their number of students in class, though not very much. “We will have to find out that if we turn our entire school into an English medium, what kind of class size will have to be maintained, admission or the restriction of entry cannot be refused by state schools,” the headmaster said.
“We shall see how this program will spread, especially at this point of time where classes are being taught using computers.” However, according to documents circulated among teachers, English will be used as a teaching medium by the school of social and economic education. No such information was communicated to the rest of the 10 schools, the headmaster added.
