– Mita Mukherjee

The Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) has taken a string of initiatives to make the ICSE (Class X) and ISC (Class XIII) curricula “contemporary” and futuristic”.

“The Council has decided to undertake academic revamp by revising a number of subjects taught at the ICSE and ISC levels, introducing new emerging subjects like entrepreneurship, changing the nomenclature of commerce and naming it business studies, overhauling the syllabuses and curriculum from pre-school to Class VIII to make learning more joyful, engaging and activity-based for students and link learning to real-life experiences in tune with NEP recommendations, organising extensive training for teachers for developing their skills to tackle changing classroom environment and by launching the Counselling and Resilience Education (CARE) fellowship to train school counsellors to support mental well-being of students,” Joseph Emmanuel, CISCE chief executive and secretary, told EducationWorld.

For example, he said the Council took the decision to introduce entrepreneurship at the ISC level from exam year 2028 considering the present day need to produce more entrepreneurs in the country and the increasing demand among schools and students for new emerging subjects.

“There are two aspects for introducing entrepreneurship. There is a need to have sufficient entrepreneurs. So we have to create entrepreneurial ability among students. Second, there is an increasing demand among students and schools for new emerging subjects. So, curriculum committee members of the board discussed the issue and recommended that entrepreneurship should be introduced,” the CISCE chief told EducationWorld.

He said, “The whole idea is to make the ICSE and ISC courses contemporary and futuristic. Commerce has been renamed for the same reason. In most universities commerce is a stream. They offer bachelor of degree in commerce. It was treated as a single subject before. There has been further emergence but the nomenclature continued to be the same. The council felt the need to make it more focused because as a subject commerce covers many areas, accountancy, business studies, economics and also entrepreneurship,” Emmanuel said.

There is a growing demand among students and teachers to introduce statistics as a subject because many teachers feel developing statistical thinking among students from school level is gradually becoming important.

According to the council chief since statistics is already a part of applied mathematics, there is no plan to introduce the subject in the curriculum as of now.

Extensive teacher training programme is being executed for teachers to address mental well-being of students ahead of 2026 board exams. The training is for the teachers. But by training the counsellors, the council aims to ensure that they are able to handle mental health of students in a better way.

The Council plans to execute the curriculum revamp programme in a phased manner from 2026- 27 covering pre-school to Class VIII.

Principals of schools have been informed about the council decisions through circulars and most schools welcomed the council initiatives.

Rodney Borneo, principal of St. Augustine’s Day School, Shyamnagar in West Bengal said the introduction of entrepreneurship will help many students who aim to start their own business.

“Today when young people are thinking about startups and thinking out of the box to begin something new on their own, introduction of the subject will give them huge edge on how to start their business,” Rodney told EducationWorld.

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