NCF 2023: Pune teachers, parents seek clarity over 2 board exams a year, excess administrative work

“For example, my child could be struggling with trigonometry which takes time to learn. The Diwali holidays, winter vacation and preparatory leaves help in giving extra time to such topics. If there will be Board exams just a few months into the year, when will they get the time to prepare and study by themselves,” she asks.

Until now, Board examinations have been a rather lengthy affair which begins with registrations that commence often a year before the exams. Schools plan their terms and internal examinations as well as syllabus revisions and preparatory leaves accordingly. With the possibility of bi-annual board examinations, school administrations are raising concerns about the possible logistical changes and administrative workload that could arise.

“The exams we had to conduct once a year will now happen twice, so the administrative work will also double along with the required human resources, time and technical expertise like computer teachers and everything,” said Vikas Chaudhari, the principal of a CBSE school in Lohegaon. “This could hamper our regular school functioning because when the school becomes a board examination centre, we have to give a holiday to other classes, plan the seating arrangement and other such logistics.”

Apart from this, the NCF 2023 has put the spotlight on multilingualism. Native languages were a major focus of National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 in accordance with which studying at least two native languages out of a total of three will become mandatory for students up to Class 10. For classes 11 and 12, at least one of two languages should be a native language.

With this, classes 9 and 10 will now have seven mandatory subjects instead of five, and classes 11 and 12 will have six mandatory subjects instead of four.

The NCF 2023 states, “Schools need to make arrangements to develop in students the desirable values and dispositions, capacities, and knowledge through which the aims of education are achieved. As mentioned before, these arrangements can range from selection and appointment of teachers to school culture, to the actual subjects that are taught in the school.”

The earlier existing streams of arts, science and commerce will now be replaced by three groups of subjects and students will have to choose six or seven subjects, depending on which class they are in, out of these groups. One group includes art education, vocational education and physical education. Another includes social sciences, humanities and interdisciplinary subjects. The third group consists of subjects like science, mathematics and computational thinking.

The social sciences syllabus for classes 6 to 8 will now have as much local and regional content as national and global. At least 20 per cent of the syllabus is recommended to be of local relevance, 30 per cent of regional importance and the remaining should be of national (30%) and global (20%) relevance.

“As long as the important national and international parts are covered, it is good that students will gain some local flavour,” added Khare. “How they will implement this, how they will create this content, how good that will be, how non-discriminatory and unbiased it will be, that we will have to see.”

Rahul W, a biology teacher, said, “Several new subjects that have been introduced would require either new teachers or additional trainings. It is a policy document right now and we are yet to find out how it will be implemented because the task is a big one.”

NCF 2023 was developed by a 13-member steering committee led by former Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chief K Kasturirangan. The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has now set up a committee to create textbooks in accordance with this framework for classes 3 to 12.

The changes are thus expected to reflect in the CBSE syllabus and textbooks. The Education Ministry said earlier this year that new textbooks would be introduced from the 2024-25 academic year.

With Karnataka refusing to implement NEP 2020, it remains to be seen to what extent and in what ways states will adopt the recommendations of NCF 2023 through the State Curriculum Framework for School Education.