CBSE asks private schools to list out teachers’ duties

NEW DELHI: The CBSE wants to ensure that teachers in private schools are not saddled with non-teaching work, a common complaint across the country, and will in coming

NEW DELHI: The CBSE wants to ensure that teachers in private schools are not saddled with non-teaching work, a common complaint across the country, and will in coming days ask these institutes for staff details.

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The Central Board of Secondary Education, the country’s biggest school board, would issue a circular to all the around 16,000 private schools affiliated to it to give information about the work assigned to the non-academic staff, sources said.

Some of the Delhi’s top schools are among the 1,200 institutes that will have to share the information.

The board, said sources, received several complaints — from private teachers’ associations and individual teachers — that schools were keeping costs down by asking teachers to collect fee and perform bus duties among other chores. These jobs ideally should be done by clerical staff or non-teaching employees.

“We have been taking up this matter with the CBSE and it will be good if they ask private schools for details of teachers and administrative staff and the duties they perform,” said Sheik Shabbir Ali, president of Telangana Private Teachers Forum, one of the associations that took up the matter with the board.

In many schools, teachers were expected to call parents to inform them about fee, keep a watch on students during lunch break and fill up forms, he said. But not everyone agrees. SK Bhattacharya, who is the president of Delhi’s action committee unaided recognised private schools, said teachers were not doing administrative work.

“Teachers are only involved in academic activities. But teaching is not just limited to classrooms and teachers work on activities like debate, dance and sports,” he said.

A teacher in a school in Uttar Pradesh’s Indirapuram said teachers were overworked. The continuous and comprehensive evaluation (CCE), which required teachers to maintain a file on each student, had increased their workload. “There are over more than parameters under CCE and we have to give remarks for each activity for each student. Apart from that we are made to do other odd works which take a toll,” the teacher said on condition of anonymity.

As per CBSE rules a private school should have a separate set of teaching and non-teaching staff, said an official. “By burdening them (teachers) with non-teaching work, we kill their creativity and education will suffer,” the official said.