The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is all set to go global with its new curriculum as CBSEI (CBSE International), offering the schools in foreign countries affiliated with it an option to have a global flavour.

This curriculum will be based on the lines of the Internationalm Baccalaureate (IB) and International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) and will be launched from the upcoming academic session, that is, April 1.

There are many CBSE-affiliated schools in West and South Asian countries. But students in these schools are unable to compete internationally by just studying an India-centric syllabus. "This curriculum will help them get recognition internationally," Vineet Joshi, chairman of CBSE, said on Monday.

Joshi said that this curriculum will be different from the present one and will have an International flavor. "In this curriculum methodology will be child centric and there will be no fixed textbooks." He added that flexibility will be given in subjects like social science, mathematics, geography and history.

Initially 45 schools, which are already offering CBSE curriculum abroad, had applied for the new curriculum. But only 25 schools were shortlisted by the CBSE. These schools are from six countries, namely, Oman, Muscat, Dubai, Singapore, Qatar and the UAE. Each of these schools have an average of 9,000 children and many of these schools also offer some other international curriculum

Sources in the human resource development ministry said that CBSEI will be an edge over the other international curriculum being offered in schools abroad as they are quite expensive.

The new international syllabus for class I and IX will be introduced in the coming academic session. And then, every year the syllabus for new classes will be introduced. Experts and specially trained teachers from India will go to these schools to train teachers there in the second week of May.

But these schools will have to shell out more to get affiliation to this new curriculum. Right now the schools abroad who are offering the CBSE curriculum have to pay an affiliation fee of Rs 1.25 lakh. But for CBSEI, these schools will have to spend Rs 2.50 lakh for affiliation.

The ministry has plans to publicise this curriculum and introduce it to other schools abroad. So far, it has no plan to take this curriculum to schools in India but sources said that if successful it could be introduced here.

The books under this curriculum will based upon National Curriculum Framework 2005 and will use NCERT books. And the evaluation will be based upon Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE), the one that CBSE schools use in India.

"It will be difficult for us to say whether board exams for class 12th will continue or not," Joshi said. Adding, "We will take school's opinion on this and depending on that we will decide."