No place for other boards in CBSE schools

The Central Board of Secondary Education has ruled out the possibility of allowing schools affiliated to it to run the International Baccalaureate (IB) courses.

The board feels that IB is using platform of some Indian schools to market its own product. ?CBSE keeps interacting with various boards both domestically and internationally. We are in constant touch with Cambridge and the Australian board and try to modify our curriculum as per the modern needs, the recent being the changes in question pattern both for class 10 th and 12 th board so as to check higher order intelligence of the students. But, this does not mean that we will let other boards to use our space (CBSE?s affiliated schools platform) for commercilisation? CBSE chairman Ashok Ganguly told FE.

?We want to make it clear to everybody that schools affiliated to us should not run courses affiliated to any other board or private institution including IB. If they to do so, they will lose CBSE recognition? he added. ?IB is using our space to market its own brand . We cannot let this happen? said Ganguly.

IB runs three programmes for students aged between 3 and 19 with an aim to develop intellectual, personal, emotional and social skills so as to make them live, learn and work in a rapidly globalising world. There are more than 5,68,000 IB students at 2,125 schools in 125 countries across the globe. In India, the total number of schools running IB courses is 39. All the 39 schools are affiliated to boards other than the CBSE.

Some of the well known schools running these programmes in India are Dhirubhai Ambani International School, DPS International, Saket, GD Goenka World School and The Shri Ram School, among others.

In India, the IB is seen as a ?passport? to get entry into universities abroad. The schools, which are running IB programmes, are mostly international schools and are privately funded. Hence these are very expensive. But in spite of this, parents are willing to spend a lot on their children?s education, paving the way for a mushrooming of schools that offer IB.