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BMC ropes in top accreditation body to assess its 30 schools

The civic body on Tuesday signed a memorandum of undertaking with NABET for the assessment of 30 schools

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The assessment exercise is expected to be completed in six months
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The BMC has roped in the National Accreditation Board of Education and Training, a constituent board of Quality Council of India, to improve teaching, learning, security, infrastructure and governance of its schools.

The civic body on Tuesday signed a memorandum of undertaking with NABET for the assessment of 30 schools. The exercise is expected to be completed in six months, said officials. The corporation will go for the assessment of the remaining 1,700 schools in the city if the efforts produce encouraging results, said officials.

"There cannot be a drastic change. However, NABET has the pattern of focusing on problem areas to start with. Once the areas are recognised, self-assessment, which will be done by the schools, comes into the picture that will make a habit in them to make an action plan," said Madhu Ahluwalia, senior advisor at NABET.

Ahluwalia said once the learning outcome increases, the rest follows. "We don't pick a school based on its conditions. We pick and start working on the section it needs the most," she added. NABET has been associated with civic schools in Delhi for past two years. It has evaluated over 5,000 schools so far.

The project will be divided into two phases – assessment and certification of schools as per the framework of NABET Accreditation Standard for Quality School Governance and Quality Intervention in Teaching. In the first phase, schools will be evaluated on governance, education and support process, performance measurement and improvement.

In the second phase, the students from Class 5 to 8 will be involved in the assessment via a multiple choice question paper and teacher-classroom observation. The findings will be used to design interventions to improve pedagogical practices in school.

"We launched our third-party audit for education and schools with the aim of fair external audit for improving on our standards and methods of teaching, learning and education infrastructure," tweeted Aaditya Thackeray, president of Yuva Sena, the brain behind the project.

Unfair exercise, stress experts

Third-party audit of BMC schools will end up demoralising the teachers, said experts.

"Teachers are asked to do all the non-academic work all day of the year along with maintaining their sole responsibility of teaching. Then suddenly, through such audits, they are blamed for not doing their teaching job properly. That is unfair," said Simantini Dhuru, director of Avehi Abacus project, that serves municipal schools and non-formal education centers in the city. KL Subhakanti, a retired-teacher, said the audit might identify problem areas, but won't offer a solution.

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