The three-year reign of the vintage Head Start Montessori, Koramangala is over with the nexgen Indus Early Learning Centre, Whitefield topping the EducationWorld Bangalore Preschool Rankings 2014
The league table of bangalore (now officially Bengaluru) pre-primaries has experienced a churning in the EW India Preschool Rankings this year. At the very top, the three-year reign of Head Start Montessori, Koramangala is over with this vintage pre-primary (estb. 1984) adjudged next best to the new genre Indus Early Learning Centre, Whitefield (IELC, estb. 2011). Voted #1 on five of the ten parameters including teacher competence, teacher welfare and development, and individual attention to students, IELC has been promoted by the formidable Indus Trust which has developed the Indus International schools in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune into the country’s top-ranked international day-cum-boarding schools with IIS-B ranked #1 in the annual EW India School Rankings for the past three years. IELC, which debuted at #3 in 2012 and ranked second in the garden city last year, has been voted #1 this year by a comfortable margin.
The change at the top apart, there’s been minimal rearrangement in the seating at the Top 10 table of Bangalore’s preschools, except that the Gaia Preschool and Day Care Centre, R.T. Nagar, ranked #10 last year has been elevated by the sample respondents to #6; WeCare, Sarjapur Road to #8 (#9 last year); and most spectacularly, Greenwood High Preschool, Whitefield from #20 in 2013 to #9 this year even as Podar Jumbo Kids, Dollars Layout has held on to its #10 position.
Further down the league table of Bangalore’s Top 20 pre-primaries, while Petals Montessori, Whitefield although ranked #1 on the parameter of safety and hygiene has yielded rank, three promising and previously unranked preschools — Tara Early Learning Centre, Indiranagar; Klay Prep School & Day Care, Electronic City and Seed International, OMBR Layout have made impressive debuts into Bangalore’s Top 20 league table.
“I am delighted with the top rank awarded by Bangalore’s informed parent and teacher communities to IELC this year. This is the outcome of the dedication of our teachers and the vision of the promoters and top management of the Indus Trust. Quite obviously, our adoption of best international practices in early childhood education and focus on the professional development of teachers within the broad framework of the education philosophy of IBO, Geneva has favourably impacted the discerning public of Bangalore. I’m particularly pleased that IELC has been top-ranked on the parameters of teacher competence, teacher welfare and development, and individual attention to students,” says Jacinth Rose Portess, an education and early years education alumna of the Christian Light Education College, USA and the New Zealand Tertiary College, and head of IELC ab initio. 
This sentiment about a job well done receiving public approbation, is discernible in the reaction of Rekha D’Souza, an MBA of Bangalore’s Mount Carmel Institute of Management who worked for over a decade as an advertising professional in the Emirates prior to signing up with the Gaia Preschool (estb. 2003) as managing partner. “Gaia’s steadily improved ranking in the EW league tables is proof that parent and academic communities in the city are becoming aware of the uniquely differential curriculum based on Reggio Emilia principles that we provide to pre-primary children. Evidently, word is spreading within the city about the environmentally-connected, egalitarian and child-centric early childhood care and education which respects every child’s individuality that we provide,” says D’Souza. Currently, Gaia Preschool has 65 children in the 18 months to five years age group nurtured by seven teachers, on its muster rolls.
Despite the prospect of hitherto wholly autonomous pre-primary schools being brought under the regulatory umbrella of Karnataka’s notoriously corrupt educracy and inspectorate, as testified by the growing number of new entrants into this year’s EW preschool league tables, the ECCE scene in the state and the fast-expanding city of Bangalore in particular, is jumping. Even if educrats of the state government haven’t awoken to the vital importance of professionally-administered ECCE, citizens — a majority of whom are young, upwardly mobile IT and new-age industry professionals — have.
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