The Karnataka State Board syllabus, and how to find your child's

Three separate bodies do three separate jobs, and most confusion in a syllabus search comes from treating them as one organisation.

• DSERT – the Department of State Educational Research and Training – is the academic wing of the Department of Public Instruction. It provides the academic leadership for school education in the state and publishes the syllabuses, the learning outcomes and the Karnataka Curriculum Framework, first published in 2007. If a document deserves the word syllabus, it comes from here.
• KTBS – the Karnataka Textbook Society – prints and supplies textbooks for Standards 1 to 10 across every medium of instruction the state recognises. Children in government and aided schools receive them free. This is the syllabus as your child actually encounters it.
• KSEAB – the Karnataka School Examination and Assessment Board – conducts the SSLC examination at Standard 10 and the PUC examinations, along with scholarship examinations such as NMMS and NTSE.

The practical consequence is clear in one sentence: syllabus questions belong to DSERT, book questions to KTBS, and examination questions to KSEAB. When a parent asks what is in the Standard 7 syllabus, they almost always mean what is in the Standard 7 KTBS book – because that is what the school will teach and what it will test.

For the fuller explanation, including how the three fit together and what each one decides, see our Karnataka State Board page.

DSERT is the official publisher. Its website is dsert.karnataka.gov.in; we link it alongside this page but can't describe its contents because the host was unreachable when we last checked. That's a factual note, not a criticism—government servers block connections for various reasons—but it means we won't describe a page we couldn't access ourselves.

The printed KTBS textbook is the second authoritative source and usually faster for parents: it shows the same syllabus, in teaching order, and you likely already own it.

We deliberately do not summarise either source. Third-party syllabus downloads frequently contain last year's document with only the year updated in the header, and parents cannot tell by reading. Your school and the KTBS textbook are both authoritative, both current and completely free.

Most pages ranking for this search print a list of chapter names; this page does not. Here is why, stated plainly: we have not seen Karnataka's own 2026-27 syllabus documents, and posting a list we cannot source would mean inventing your child's school year.

Chapter lists are particularly risky for this state. Karnataka's assessment arrangements below Standard 10 have changed more than once in recent years. KSEAB has administered state-set summative assessments for some primary and middle standards, and whether these apply in any given year has shifted. Textbook revisions, meanwhile, do not announce themselves on the pages that copied the old list.

What does endure is this: knowing which body decides the policy, which book to plan from, which subjects the timetable adds and when, which languages are fixed by statute, and where the first external examination sits. Armed with those five facts, a parent can get the current chapter list within a day from a source that is actually current.

Some of what a Karnataka child studies is not the school's decision at all, and this is the part parents are most often surprised by after moving to the state.

The Kannada Language Learning Act, 2015 (Karnataka Act No. 22 of 2015) requires Kannada to be taught as a compulsory language in all classes and all schools across the state, either as a first or second language, phasing in from Standard 1 through Standard 10. The Act's definition of 'school' is broad: it includes state-run, local body and private schools, both aided and unaided, minority institutions, matriculation and Anglo-Indian schools. A CBSE or ICSE school in Bengaluru faces exactly the same requirement as a state board school. Schools must use the textbooks the State Government prescribes for Kannada teaching, so this is a fixed part of the syllabus, not optional. The Act also allows children whose mother tongue is not Kannada, and who haven't selected it as a first or second language, to study their mother tongue as a third language instead.

The timetable itself changes in a predictable way. Standards 4 and 5 feature a first language, English as second language, Mathematics and Environmental Studies. From Standard 6, the schedule becomes: first language, English, Hindi as a third language, Mathematics, Science and Social Science - so EVS splits and Hindi arrives simultaneously. Parents who plan tuition for a Standard 5 child without understanding this transition often find themselves scrambling in Standard 6. Our Kannada subject page explores the language itself in greater depth.

Standard 10 is when the syllabus stops being a school matter. KSEAB conducts the SSLC examination - the first external, certificate-bearing exam a Karnataka state board child sits. Everything before it is set and marked inside her own school.

Two important things follow. First, the examination has a published pattern, and KSEAB publishes it - not guide sites or coaching centres. That is where your Standard 10 family should be reading. Second, the examined syllabus is a two-year body of work in most subjects. This means the real preparation year is Standard 9, not the last term of Standard 10.

We do not print a mark distribution or a paper blueprint here. What we will say is what matters structurally: the board examines once, at Standard 10, and a child arriving with Standard 8 arithmetic still shaky is being asked to do two jobs at once. That is a tuition problem with a clear shape, and it is worth starting early - see Class 9 and Class 10 tuition.

We do not teach a board and we do not teach a downloaded syllabus. We teach the actual book your child was issued, working through it in the sequence your school is using, with our own progression running underneath so gaps get caught even when the class moves on.

• Book list first. Send us the actual books your child carries – medium included – and we build the plan from that rather than from assumptions about what Standard 6 in Karnataka includes.
• The school's sequence, not ours. If your class is on the third unit in October, we work from there, repairing earlier gaps alongside rather than instead.
• Languages named honestly. Kannada, Hindi and English are three separate challenges for most Karnataka children, and the weakest of the three is usually the one nobody has examined.
• The Standard 6 step planned for in Standard 5, since EVS splits into Science and Social Science and Hindi arrives in the same term.

Group and one-to-one rates are on the fees page, and free online tests are available whether or not you book a class.