Schools get mandate to go 100% offline

With daily Covid-19 cases showing a steady decline and recovery rate gradually improving, the Supreme Committee on Covid-19 has decided to follow the policy of co-existing with Covid-19 as in the rest of the world.

Apart from easing travel procedures to near pre-pandemic levels, even the Supreme Committee has said that classes of all grades will return to conventional education from Sunday.

“The Supreme Committee also decided to allow the system of direct education in schools with 100 per cent capacity at all levels of study with effect from March 6, but without prejudice to precautionary health measures’’, the statement said.

All Indian schools have issued circulars that the new academic year will be completely offline and the CBSE board exams for XI and XII will be offline, starting in late April.

Several Omani mothers have also welcomed the switch to the traditional system and told the Observer: “Online education was never practical while hybrid saw frequent disruptions as cases urged.”

While most schools returning to offline education, the Supreme Committee decided to revert to the online education system for primary school (classes 1-4) for a period of four weeks from January 16, following the surge in the Omicron variant of Covid during the months of January and February.

The offline schools did hit students hard as a surge in Covid cases in 2021 made even hybrid education a non-starter.

The decision which was seen as temporary in March 2021 to limit the spread of a virus continued for nearly 18 months across the globe.

According to International Monetary Fund (IMF), nearly 300 million students across the globe were forced out of schools as countries employed unprecedented measures in 2020 to bring the situation under control.