Anew programme in Delhi government schools will try to increase student leadership and ownership of their schools by setting up elected ‘Student Advisory Boards’.
This project will first be introduced in 20 schools on a pilot basis, and the boards will comprise two children from each section of grades 7, 8, 9 and 11 who will be selected through intra-section elections.
According to a note prepared by the Directorate of Education on this initiative, “It is envisioned that the Student Advisory Board will assist in augmenting and maximizing student participation in various leadership roles at the school level. The SAB will act as a voice of the students. SAB will contribute towards developing a sense of ownership in students, by designing, managing and executing various school activities.
Schools have been issued strict instructions that these boards should be equally split in terms of gender in co-ed schools. Before the elections, students will also be told about “values and actions to look for” while choosing board members such as “always helps his/her classmates”, “actions never cause physical, emotional or mental harm to self or others”.
Once the boards have been elected, schools have been encouraged to set up different sub-committees such as a co-curricular sub-committee, sports affair sub-committee, culture & assembly sub-committee, and student discipline sub-committee to look at discipline-related issues and organise events such as a theatre festival, musical day and awareness campaigns.
The DoE will even be conducting training sessions for the School Advisory Board members with the stated goals of ‘vision of excellence’, ‘a sense of responsibility’, ‘vision setting’, ‘goal setting’ and ‘execution’, and will be conducting “exposure visits” to other schools with such boards.
Before this, the Directorate has introduced various measures to increase parent participation in school governance by making School Management Committees active and bringing on board parents as school mitras.