Good news for school children, as much as for their parents. No more homework for children in Bangalore schools affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), which is setting a trend for other boards.These schools are in the process of doing away with the seemingly agonising task of homework, the burden which every child carries back home — and in most cases, shared by their parents or older siblings, too.The CBSE board under the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) scheme has issued instructions to all schools to minimise the system of homework and tests from the school curriculum as part of classroom assessment of students.

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“We have received the notice and are in the process of ending the system of homework completely from our school curriculum,” Manju Sharma, principal, Delhi Public School (DPS), South, told DNA. “Anyway, we are following the process of not giving homework to children till Class V. We have homework only for higher classes; that too based on applications. We have one project work in a week for each student.”The circular was issued by CBSE after it received feedback from various stakeholders, including parents and students, to lessen the burden of homework and tests for students. Some students sent in written complaints to CBSE saying that homework is very agonising, day after day, and hampering their natural growth.The CBSE introduced CCE scheme in schools as a part of its educational reform process in 2009.“Parents, students, teachers and principals said that too many tests, assignments, projects, homework and review tests (in some schools, as many as seven tests a week) are being held. Many a time, projects given to students to be done at home lead to no real learning as they are either done by siblings or parents or conveniently outsourced to entrepreneurs,’’ said the recent circular by CBSE chairman Vineet Joshi.