Calcutta, Aug. 6: No class. Love the chaos, if you can. Come to school, chat with mates and pack your bag in the afternoon.

This appears to have become the routine for class XI students in many reputable higher secondary schools, thanks to the recent government decision to split the course and set HS exam questions only from the Class XII syllabus.

The government had announced nearly a fortnight ago that the HS syllabus will be carved up. But the West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education has not yet given the schools any information on the chapters that are to be covered in Class XI.

As a result, even a month and a half after the academic session started in most schools, none of them have been able to begin teaching.

“We have the syllabus, but we do not know what to teach. This is a strange experience. We had never faced this problem before,” said Ishita Das, the principal of Patha Bhavan.

Under the old system, the HS exams covered the combined syllabus for classes XI and XII. The schools had the liberty to decide which chapters from the syllabus would be taught in class XI.

The worst affected, however, are the schools that cater primarily to high-performing students.

“We are facing an array of questions from guardians every day. Unlike in state- aided schools, where students are offered education free of cost, we cannot afford the kind of deadlock prevailing at present. Our students have to pay a fairly good amount of tuition and other fees. We cannot make them sit idle the whole day even for a day,” said the principal of a reputable school in south Calcutta.

Some among the schools facing the same crisis are St Lawrence, Gokhale Memorial, Sree Sikshayatan, South Point and Naba Nalanda.

One of the school heads said: “Suppose we teach a particular poem in English and find later that it has been slotted for Class XII? The teaching will not go waste but the students, for obvious reasons, will take the exercise casually.”

Debashis Sarkar, the secretary of the West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education, said they are working overtime to complete the process of dividing the syllabus. The schools, however, “will have to wait till the end of this month”, he added.

Sarkar said: “We will be able to give the real picture on the content of the Class XI syllabus by August-end.”

But another council decision has compounded the problem. It is now mandatory for the schools to complete the annual Class XI examinations by March 31.

“The greater the delay, the more inconvenienced students would be,” said Father Charles Pollet, the head of St Lawrence’s HS section.