For principals, trustees and exam coordinators
Operational guidance for people who run CBSE schools
Circulars decoded into what you actually have to do, assessment machinery that holds up to a parent dispute, and the operational consequences everyone else skips. Two posts a week.
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What a competency-based question actually looks like: ten rewrites
CBSE's question papers for 2026-27 Class 10 are out, with the files dated 21 and 22 September, and they show item by item what separates a competency question from a recall one. Here are ten ordinary questions rewritten the same way, across four subjects, with answers.
After the half-yearlies: read the results by question, not by student
A section average tells you almost nothing about what to teach next. Read the same marks three ways, by cohort, by question and by prerequisite, and a class of "weak students" often turns out to be one missing skill from two years back.
The 20 internal marks are the ones you will have to defend. CBSE has already written down how.
The 80-mark paper is the board's to justify, and the 20 marks awarded inside your school are yours. The 2026-27 curriculum lists, in some detail, the record it expects you to be able to produce when someone asks.
APAAR is optional in the 2026-27 LOC. Entering one comes with a consent step.
Last year CBSE made schools enter REFUSED or NOGEN for every student without an APAAR ID. This year the field is optional. But page 33 of the LOC circular attaches three conditions to any ID you do enter, and one of them is a consent the circular never describes.
The LOC window opens on 24 September. If you pay by challan, it closes four days early.
CBSE published the 2026-27 List of Candidates circular on 21 September. The last dates sit in two annexure tables at the back, and they differ for the same fee slab depending on whether the school pays online or by challan.
Setting the Class 10 half-yearly: the 2026-27 blueprint no longer matches last year's paper
Most half-yearly papers are last September's paper with the numbers changed. For Class 10 this year that quietly tests three topic blocks the board has taken out of the year-end exam — and CBSE has not published a 2026-27 model to check against.
The third language arrived mid-session. Your Class 9 timetable did not.
CBSE made R3 compulsory for Class IX from 1 July, after an April notification said it would not apply until 2029-30. Both documents are still on the site. The operational load is a 100-mark internal assessment and a certificate nobody can be awarded without it.
CBSE is retiring Maths Basic and adding Maths Advanced. Those point opposite ways.
Class 9 Mathematics and Science now run at two levels. The easier paper your school used as a safety valve is being discontinued, and the new second level is a harder optional one. For one year you will be running both systems at once.
One term into the new Class 9 books. Here is what the paperwork admits.
NCERT ran the Social Science teacher webinar on 20 April. On 1 May the book was still unpublished. By 24 June a fake copy was circulating on WhatsApp. Everything else about this term is a question we cannot answer from Delhi.
CBSE's two-phase Class 10 board has run once. Your calendar has not caught up.
The first full cycle is finished and the numbers are out. The operational trap is not the exam — it is the LOC schedule, whose first window closes before anyone knows their Phase 1 marks.
CBSE has introduced CT and AI for Classes 3 to 8. Nobody new is teaching it.
The curriculum framework is live from this session and asks for 50 hours a year in the primary classes and 100 in the middle. It also assumes your existing subject teachers will absorb all of it.
What this covers
Circular decoding
What a CBSE circular actually means for your school, operationally.
NEP / NCF-SE
Implementing the new framework without drowning your teachers.
Teacher enablement
Methods your teachers can use on Monday morning.
School operations
The machinery behind assessment, admissions and planning.
Data
Compiled analysis you will not find anywhere else.