What tag to use for the Educational Board that a school belongs to?

Communities India
1

For clarification I am talking about values like CBSE, ICSE, [Insert State Name] State Board, etc…
Does school:affiliation=* sound good ?

2

Would operator=* be accurate?

In Ireland, while most schools will have a local board managing each individual school, they operate under a patron which might be a religious organisation, education charity, or statutory education and training board.

The individual school boards have only a certain level of autonomy and it tends to be the patron that decides on big issues. operator=* tends to be the patron.

3

I am unsure, the boards here have limited influence on the schools. It is mostly a choice between educational frameworks set up by the government. Some schools are affiliated to multiple boards to let the students choose the framework they have to study under.

I would say it is useful to put the actual operator of the school in the operator tag and add the board info elsewhere.

4

In this context, it seems like “educational framework” is a similar term to “curriculum framework”, which leads to “International Baccalaureate”, which has a world-wide following.

While that won’t lead to an OSM tag to use, I believe that the tag you want has more to do with “curriculum” and less to do with “affiliation”.

5

Yep, IB is one of the recognized boards, here is a list of the 72 boards in India Complete List of 72 COBSE Recognized Education Boards & Councils in India 2026

6

The language used to describe these bodies (“board”, which is misleading) is somewhat unique to India. Also, as mentioned by others, this has more to do with standardised curriculum and testing, overseen by the government … and increasingly with indoctrination and disinformation in present times.

A close-enough key/subkey doesn’t seem to exist, either with school:* or education:* Also, I can’t find any practice of tagging such information on schools globally.

If a new subtag must be created for this, it must indicate both the country (with a 2 char ISO code), and the fact that this is a government body. Additionally, the values should be the full names, not acronyms or initials. This should avoid a mix-up with any similar sounding, globally used keys or tags. Affiliation, curriculum, board, operator, ref, etc. don’t really seem suitable for this purpose, do they?

Suggestion:

  • Accreditation is a more suitable word to work with here. It also ties in with my next suggestion.

  • The best way I see is to use Wikidata for this, since most Indian educational boards are already on it, and it eliminates 30 different variations of how people would write cbse/icse.
    So the values for our tag key can just be wikidata entries.

    Also, within Wikidata boards like the ones we are discussing are already classified as school accreditor.

So for a CBSE or ICSE, we could use,

school_accreditor:wikidata=Q3347350 or school_gov_accreditor:wikidata=Q3347350

school_accreditor:wikidata=Q3350855 or school_in_accreditor:wikidata=Q3350855

And if not using wikidata references,

school:accreditor=”Central Board of Secondary Education”
school:accreditor=”Indian Certificate of Secondary Education”
or
school:accreditor_gov=
school:accreditor_in=

1 Like
7

I didn’t get the reasoning here, what info does _[country code] or _gov add ? why wouldn’t school_accreditor:wikidata=* or school_accreditor=* be sufficient.

Also should we keep the school prefix or generalize it for accredition of any institution with accreditor=* and accreditor:wikidata=* ?

8

Please use the common format “:XX” (colon and capital letters). school:IN:accreditor would be the key fitting to existing tagging schemes.

Features that are unique to a country should always have the country code in the key name to not cause confusion between different areas. Compare to the “school:XX” tags that are used to tag the exact type of school according to local law.

Btw. “accreditor” can’t be found in the dictionary - a proper English word might be preferable.