Child rights panel to grade 5,800 schools

NEW DELHI: The Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights is planning to submit a comprehensive report on the status of all schools in the capital, with grades allotted on a set of parameters. At least 5,800 schools will be evaluated during this process. The commission was allocated Rs 15 crore by the government earlier this year to conduct the grading exercise.
According to commission officials, the grading will be done on the basis of four umbrella parameters — security, teaching, community involvement and social inclusion.

Under security, a large part of the framework will be based on guidelines set by the directorate of education. Further, aspects of sanitation and health will be included in the framework. Through the teaching and learning index, the commission wants to monitor learning outcomes and evaluate how academically sound the infrastructure of a school is to provide the student appropriate standard of education. The assessment will be done through a sample size collected from each school, until Class VIII. Beyond that, the commission will take help of an NGO to assess the students through a designed assessment tool. For higher board classes, the CBSE results will be taken as indicators.
Simultaneously, student-teacher ratio, student-classroom ratio teach-vacancy status and section-teacher ratio will be used to evaluate under this index, among other parameters. The community participation index will be based on the frequency of PTA meetings, attendance in these meetings, SMC involvement and EWS student integration.
Security aspects like fire safety will also be scrutinised. According to commission sources, at least 200 schools in the capital are yet to get fire safety certificates.
Once the survey is done, the commission, with the help of some NGOs, will visit schools and carry out a ground survey. This exercise is expected to start in December and continue for three months. The final report and grading will be released in March 2019. This coincides with the time several parents start looking at schools for admissions.
If found defaulting, local bodies and agencies will also be held accountable. “For example, if a school has garbage strewn over the campus, the principal alone won’t be held responsible. What if the actual problem is that the school has no safai karamcharis?” said Anurag Kundu, a DCPCR member and chairman of the working group committee for the grading exercise.