Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan

Six years as on 31 March of the academic year in which admission is sought, and the guidelines add expressly that a child born on 1 April is also to be considered. That single sentence rescues a large number of applications each year. Age bands are published for Classes I to X on the same 31 March reference date, so an older child applying laterally is checked against the band for that class rather than against Class I.

Anyone may apply, but not everyone competes on equal terms. Admission runs down a priority order built for the network's original purpose: children of transferable and non-transferable central government employees and ex-servicemen first, then children of employees of central autonomous bodies, public sector undertakings and institutes of higher learning, then state government employees, then state-level autonomous bodies and public sector undertakings, and then everybody else. Within a tie, the number of parental transfers in the last seven years is used. A general applicant is competing for seats left after those claims.

As read on the KVS fee page, there is a one-time admission fee of Rs 25, no tuition fee for Classes I to VIII, Rs 200 a month for Classes IX and X, and Rs 300 a month for Classes XI and XII in Commerce and Humanities or Rs 400 in Science. Add a Computer Fund of Rs 100 a month from Class III and Vidyalaya Vikas Nidhi of Rs 500 a month across all classes, which is the line that dominates the bill. Exemptions cover girls, SC and ST students, families below the poverty line and the single girl child. We mark this partly verified because the fee page could not be re-fetched on the day of writing, so confirm the figures with the school.

By written test rather than by priority alone. It is one paper of three hours and 100 marks covering Hindi, English, Mathematics, Social Science and Science. The qualifying mark is 33 per cent in aggregate, relaxed to 25 per cent for SC, ST and children with special needs. Treating it as a formality is the most common mistake, because it is a real selection test taken by children already sitting in other schools.

The admission guidelines deliberately do not say. They set out the rules; the year-specific calendar is issued separately as an admission schedule and a newspaper advertisement from the regional office, and registration for Class I is then done online through the admission portal once it goes live. So the document that tells you the rules is not the document that tells you the dates, and waiting for the dates to appear in the guidelines is a way to miss them.

No, and this catches people every year. The words appear in the names of private schools that have no connection to the Sangathan at all, Jyothy Kendriya Vidyalaya in Bengaluru being a well-known example. A genuine Kendriya Vidyalaya appears in the KVS directory of Kendriya Vidyalayas. If a school is not in that directory, it is a private school with a familiar-sounding name, and none of the fee schedule, the admission priority or the central recruitment on this page applies to it.

CBSE. The Sangathan runs the schools and CBSE prescribes the syllabus and sets the Class 10 and Class 12 papers. So a question about what is taught or about a result goes to the board, and a question about admission, fees, staffing or transfer goes to KVS or to the Vidyalaya itself.

The posts sit on 7th Central Pay Commission levels that every Kendriya Vidyalaya publishes on its own staff-remuneration disclosure page. Primary Teacher is Level 6 at Rs 35,400 to 1,12,400, Trained Graduate Teacher is Level 7 at Rs 44,900 to 1,42,400 and Post Graduate Teacher is Level 8 at Rs 47,600 to 1,51,100, with allowances on top of those ranges. Recruitment is national rather than school by school, so the route in is a KVS examination and not an application to a principal.