Panaji: The Goa board of secondary and higher secondary education has extended the date for students to apply for concessions under the scheme for children with special needs.

Students from Class IX to XII can now apply for the concessions up to September 30, the board has said through a circular.

Goa Board, under its scheme for children with special needs, provides a number of concessions to special children like the facility of reader/writer under the ‘slow learner’ and the ‘learning disabled’ categories. Students can also avail of extra time during the time.

Some of the general concessions announced by the board in 2014 through schools include decreasing writing load by setting objective type questions, allowing verbal responses for children with writing difficulties, overlooking directional mistakes in maps in geography, awarding marks for the method employed in mathematics, pardoning errors in calculation arising out of writing numbers in the wrong order, evaluating the content of the answer rather than the syntax or structure and spelling errors and allowing point-form writing.