Accreditation system: city schools lag behind

While many higher education institutions are already part of the accreditation process,schools in the city are yet to catch up on quality control standards.

While many higher education institutions are already part of the accreditation process,schools in the city are yet to catch up on quality control standards. Cities like Mumbai and Delhi have quite a few schools with a quality control certificate,but in Pune many schools are not even aware of quality control issues at the school level,according to speakers at a principals meet in the city.

Sangeet Gole,assessor for National Accreditation Board for Education and Training (NABET) said,Pune is yet to respond to the accreditation system. While we have held various training sessions for CBSE,ICSE and even SSC schools for the last two years,few have come forward so far. There are over 1300 schools in Pune but I think it will take some some time to reach out to all of them. As accreditation involves an investment in the form a certain accreditation fees,may be schools are slow in responding.

She added schools need to understand that it helps a lot in standardisation in the runnign of the school. One needs to get all kinds of supporting evidence for all programmes the school claims to run at the time of assessment for accreditation. Basically the system ensures that the child has to at the centre of everything in the school, said Gole.

Kirti Sharma,principal,Kendriya Vidyalaya,Ganeshkhind,said,So far among the KVs we’re the only ones with NABET accreditation. We got our certificate in June this year,after we were selected by the KV Sangathan last year. This year four more KV schools have been selected by the Sangathan for applying to NABET.

Madhavi Bhadgaonkar,principal,SPM English Medium School said they have ISO certification since 2005. As far as my knowledge we’re still the second educational institution in the city with the ISO certification. It has really helped in introducing a uniformity in documentation,inlcuding evaluation of the answer papers of the examinations. Also the amount of credibility has gone up in the eyes of the parents.”

However,SPM does not have NABET certification and the benchmarks are different for an ISO ceetification. Authorities at the DY Patil School are of the view that it helps define the objectives of the school better and they will soon apply for the accreditation process.

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