School Innovation Council (SIC)

School Innovation Council (SIC)- Relevance for UPSC Exam

GS Paper 2: Governance, Administration and Challenges- Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation.

Recently, key details of School Innovation Council (SIC) was provided by the Minister of State for Education, Smt. Annpurna Devi in a written reply in the Lok Sabha.

About: School Innovation Council (SIC) is an initiative taken by the Ministry of Education’s Innovation Cell (MIC).
- School Innovation Council (SIC) was launched on 1 July 2022.
Mandate: School Innovation Council (SIC) is a council of teachers, students, and experts from industry and academia to-
- Conduct round the year activities for students and teachers on Innovation and Entrepreneurship,
- Monitor through the SIC portal of the MIC,
- Record the influence at the ground level.
Implementation: School Innovation Council (SIC) has been introduced to all schools of all the states including Rajasthan.
SIC Portal: It has been developed to implement the SIC council in all schools across the nation. schools can register themselves on the SIC Portal.
Role of Schools: All registered schools are encouraged to perform innovation-related activities as per the SIC Calendar Activities that includes-
- Leadership talk,
- Motivation sessions,
- Webinars,
- Sessions,
- Awareness,
- Boot camps inviting innovative ideas from the student,
- Developing the prototype, and
- National level exhibition of the best prototypes etc.
Significance: SIC will enable mindset change, awareness, and training on Ideation, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, design thinking, Intellectual Property Rights, start-up finance, and HR among teachers and students.
- School Innovation Council (SIC) will also enable the ranking system for schools on the level of innovation-oriented activities.

About: School Innovation Ambassador Training program (SIATP) was launched through online Mode to strengthen the mentoring capacity of teachers for cultivating and handholding innovative and ingenious ideas from students.
Teacher Training Modules: Under SIATP, teachers will be trained under following five modules-
- Design Thinking & Innovation;
- Idea generation & Idea hand-holding;
- Finance/Sales/HR;
- Intellectual Property Rights(IPR);
- Entrepreneurship and Prototype/ Product Development;
Innovation Ambassadors: Under SIATP, teachers undergo 72 hours of training, and those who qualify all the five modules with a minimum 50% as passing marks are recognized as “Innovation Ambassadors”.
- It makes them competent to nurture the young school students on Ideation, IPR, product development, design thinking, problem-solving, critical thinking and skills of entrepreneurship.