Special Report

Special Report

Are boarding schools losing their shine?

With India’s several dozen capital intensive new generation boarding schools reportedly experiencing a sharp drop in admission applications, suddenly hitherto highly-prized boarding school education seems to have fallen out of fashion. Dilip Thakore reports

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There’s an ill monsoon wind blowing across India’s exclusive public (i.e private, expensive) schools, oriental replicas of the playing fields of Eton College (UK) where the historically-critical battle of Waterloo (Belgium) was reportedly won. Suddenly hitherto highly-prized boarding school education seems to have fallen out of fashion.

This development has come at a particularly bad time for the growing number of idealists, educationists and businessmen who have promoted a plethora of new generation or newgen five-star boarding schools offering never-before facilities such as twin-sharing dorms, airconditioned classrooms, state-of-the-art computer and science labs and horse-riding and microlite flying facilities in their campuses and curriculums. Constructed by page 3 architects with unprecedented capital-intensive budgets ranging from Rs.30-100 crore, India’s several dozen newgen boarding schools including Pathways World School and G.D. Goenka International, Delhi; Selaqui School, Dehra Dun; The International School, Jain International Residential School, Indus International School (all in Bangalore); Chinmaya International Residential School, Coimbatore among others, are experiencing a sharp drop in admission applications.

Moreover a newly-emergent shortage of adequately qualified teachers hasn’t helped either. Not surprisingly while most of them routinely stage low-publicity ‘road-shows’ at which academic affiliations and dazzling infrastructure facilities are detailed to upscale parents, some of them such as Pathways, G.D. Goenka and the Indus School have begun to advertise heavily in mainstream media.

"I think it’s broadly true that boarding school education in general is losing its appeal. In my opinion it’s because with increasing affluence within the Indian economy, the middle and upper classes which favoured boarding school education have become soft and lost motivation. They are fully aware that life in traditional boarding schools is tough and that children are trained to be disciplined. That’s the appeal of the new five-star boarding schools which provide air-conditioned classrooms, luxury residential accommodation and bottled water. But these schools cannot turn out the tough young people who are required to build and develop the country. In particular the worst hit will be the armed forces which look to boarding schools for their officer cadres," warns B. R. Dubey, principal of the wholly residential Birla Vidya Mandir Boys School, Nainital (est. 1947) and chairman of the Indian Public Schools Conference, an association of 75 top traditional boarding schools.

Some social scientists ascribe the fading glamour of boarding schools to the powerful influence of US-dominated cable television and popular cinema which reaches a large segment of India’s 200 million and growing middle class. These television programmes and Hollywood blockbusters tend to project kinder, gentler and nurturing attitudes towards children. Unlike the old British-influenced middle class which believed that boarding school education would toughen up children while conferring public school education status upon them, the new middle class tends to be softer and more sentimental about siblings and is veering towards saving the boarding out experience for the college years as is the norm in the US. Since the 1990s the public image of sharing, caring and even indulgent parents is carefully cultivated by the new Indian middle class.

"Whereas three to four decades ago boarding school education was almost mandatory for children from the best families, in recent times it is dictated by job considerations as much as by financial circumstances. Parents in globally transferable jobs tend to look to high-end boarding schools for their children while those in domestic transferable employment are inclined to choose the traditional boarding schools. Therefore with a considerable number of new high-end boarding schools having been established in the past decade there’s no doubt that many of them are experiencing a shortage of students. Among the new as well as traditional schools, the ones not experiencing a fall in demand are those which deliver academic excellence coupled with top grade extra-curricular facilities. That’s why TISB (The International School Bangalore) which has recorded excellent ICSE and IB (International Baccalaureate) results hasn’t suffered a decline in the number of admission applications this year. Of course the fact that we have resisted the temptation to expand capacity has also helped," says Dr. K. P. Gopalkrishna the promoter-chairman of TISB and the highly-rated five NPS (National Public School) group of academic institutions which boast an aggregate of 5,500 students on their muster rolls.

Having attained nearly legendary status for his promotion of the NPS schools whose students top the CBSE’s school-leaving classes X and XII board exams with monotonous regularity, Gopalkrishna is particularly qualified to comment upon this new phenomenon of the diminishing allure of boarding schools. All NPS institutions are day schools, whereas the state-of-the-art TISB which sprawls over 50 immaculately tended acres in suburban Bangalore, is a co-education residential-cum-day school whose curriculum development and student performance has impressed the Geneva-based International Baccalaureate Organisation and several blue-chip universities around the world which readily admit its students.

Gopalkrishna’s opinion that parents tend to choose the boarding school option for pragmatic rather than romantic or sentimental considerations is supported by clinical psychologist Dr. Sonali Nag Arulmani an alumna of Portsmouth University (UK), who together with her husband Dr. Gideon Arulmani runs the Promise Foundation, Bangalore which provides education development and consultancy services to a growing number of institutional clients in India and abroad. "Demand for boarding school education is particularly high among dual income families on fast-track career paths with unpredictable work schedules and frequent travel commit-ments. Moreover the traditional role of the boarding school as a refuge for children from broken homes, families in disarray and parents who find their children a handful continues," says Nag Arulmani.

Yet if there is growing disillusionment with boarding schools, a contributory factor is that a large number of the new capital-intensive elite schools are falling short of delivering their sky-high promises and value for the high fees they charge. Though most newgen five-star schools have sought and received affiliation with international examination boards such as the International Baccalaureate Organisation (Switzerland) and GCSE (UK) because they satisfy — and usually exceed — their infrastructure norms, many of them are experiencing a shortage of teachers who can deliver the challenging academic curriculums mandated by offshore examination boards.

This has prompted their promoters to hire expensive foreign headmasters and faculty who frequently clash and quarrel with the promoters who, given their huge investments in these exclusive residential schools, feel it incumbent to become closely involved in hands-on management of their schools. As a result many of these newgen schools including Pathways, G.D. Goenka, TISB, Selaqui and Panvel International to name a few, have experienced sudden resignations of expatriate principals and consequent academic disruptions which have disillusioned parents and affiliating boards as well.

Box 1

Boarding schools: parental opinions

Residential schools generally offer good infrastructure and other facilities in huge sylvan campuses that day schools cannot match. The wide exposure boarders get from fellow students belonging to different places and cultures helps in their all round development — M. Venkatachalam, director, Murugappa Group of companies, Chennai

I have been to boarding school myself and I know the advantages a boarding school education has to offer. It does wonders for a child’s self-confidence and his ability to handle testing situations. When parents are around a child relies on them to pull him out of trouble. But when he is on his own, his ability to rely on himself just soars — Sunil Prabhakar, director, Taj Land’s End Hotel, Mumbai

Girl children should be sent to boarding school only when they are mentally and physically prepared. Hostel life requires children to be self-dependent. Moreover they have to be old enough to distinguish between good and bad, because it’s easy to fall into bad company. For girl children such as my daughter I would recommend hostel living only after 17 — Dr. Mohan Pandey, businessman, Lucknow

Boarding school experience is necessary for every child because it helps to develop them into independent, mature adults enabling them to adjust to all types of situations and environments later in life. It provides them the opportunity to understand the meaning and virtue of discipline — Raymond Chesney, businessman, Jamalpur, Bihar

Nor has staff attrition been confined to top levels. To deliver the challenging and often unfamiliar curriculums mandated by offshore examination boards, the managements of newgen boarding schools were obliged to raid traditional, established schools for experienced teachers. This development has driven principals’ and teacher salaries through the proverbial roof, saddling the new schools already burdened with high overheads and debt-servicing costs, with high wage bills. Moreover a new phenomenon of competitive bidding inter se for the best teachers has emerged among the nexgen schools. This has prompted several of them to benchmark their teachers’ pay packages with executive pay in industry, throwing their finances into further disarray.

That’s why the managements of traditional boarding schools which have hardly any borrowals and capital costs to service — despite their star having dimmed with the promotion of a galaxy of high-profile newgen residential schools — are riding high. A case in point is downtown Bangalore’s Bishop Cotton Boys School (est.1865), the only primary-cum-secondary institution offering residential accommodation on a meaningful scale within the former garden city, now derisively known as garbage city. This highly-rated CISCE-affiliated 139-year-old school’s prime real estate 14-acre campus in the heart of the city hosts 5,300 students of whom 200 are boarders.

Ebenezer & students: sufficient and growing demand
"It’s true that many of the newer boarding schools which have sprung up across the country are experiencing hard times. Because they offer better facilities and have incurred high capital and start-up costs, they charge much higher fees than traditional boarding schools such as Bishop Cotton. The fact that our boarders pay only Rs.75,000 per year, inclusive of excellent facilities which include careful supervision, healthcare and accommo-dation is the reason why we perpetually have a long waiting list for boarders," says Dr. Abraham Ebenezer an alumnus of Mysore U and International University, Missouri (USA) and former deputy director, department of collegiate education in the Karnataka state government who has been the high-profile principal of Bishop Cotton Boys, consistently rated as Bangalore’s most preferred school by the Delhi-based weekly Outlook, since 1994.

Ebenezer doesn’t subscribe to the popular belief that public faith in boarding school education is waning. According to him, as the metros and cities of India become more unmanageable and polluted as seems inevitable, the popularity of residential schools will increase despite their high fee structures. "I don’t see the demand for admission into traditional, established boarding schools declining, because we offer high-quality education based on established values at affordable prices. On the other hand the expensive new boarding schools offer clean environ-ments, large playgrounds, contemporary curriculums and better facilities. There is sufficient and growing demand for both types of schools to flourish," adds Ebenezer.

This optimism about the future of boarding school education which is reportedly being rejected by the new generation of caring-sharing parents is shared by Dr. Lalage Prabhu, principal of the highly capital-intensive Pathways World School which has been strategically sited in Gurgaon on the outer periphery of Delhi. Promoted in 2003 by marble and granite tycoon Pramod Jain, Pathways offers its 200 students of both sexes the IB, GCSE and CISCE curriculums and state-of-the art residential and extra-curricular facilities (annual fee: Rs.2.30 lakh).

Lalage Prabhu
"I don’t share the view that parents are becoming disenchanted with boarding school education per se. However I believe they are looking for something more than the traditional residential school. The parents of our students are people who want their children in boarding schools nearer to home so that students and parents can see each other more often. Moreover they are demanding comfortable facilities and environments which are in tune with contemporary lifestyles. They also demand that residential schools offer contemporary syllabuses and curriculums to prepare students for successful lives after school," says Prabhu.

Vasudev: unmatched holistic education
Though a growing number of social scientists predict that US norms and lifestyles which favour home leaving for college education after completion of school are becoming normative in middle class India, some indigenous social scientists and educationists are still inclined to appreciate the virtues of boarding school education. "The advantage that metropolitan day schools have over residential schools which are usually located in smaller towns and rural areas, is that they get better teachers who are generally disinclined to move to remote locations. Therefore day schools tend to have better academic climates. However that said, they can never best boarding schools in terms of holistic education and child development because very few parents can offer the wide exposure to people and situations that boarding schools provide. Moreover the kind of job skills required in the contemporary world call for integration and teamwork, which is cultivated in residential schools where children learn to share and accommodate. These schools make children more self-reliant and prepare them for life," says Dr. Vasanthi Vasudev, who has a string of degrees from Delhi, Nagpur and Madras universities and is currently a director of Osmosys, a Chennai-based firm which provides a range of education consultancy services and products.

Box 2

Stduent voices

The environment is the best thing about a boarding school. You meet so many people and learn so much. My roommates are from Bengal, Uganda and Britain. This kind of exposure is not possible in day schools. Hostels instill you with a lot of confidence to live alone and this also helps in forming close international friendships — Anchal Tiwari, class XI, Doon School, Dehradun

I have been a boarder for 11 years and regard my school as a second home. The ragging and bullying which was a feature of boarding school education is history now. Day scholars don’t have the access to the school’s infrastructure — playgrounds, library, computer rooms — that we have — Chandan Prasad, class XII, Bishop Cotton School, Bangalore

My father is an officer in the defence services and is transferred constantly. But as a boarder my studies are uninterrupted. Boarding school has been a very positive experience. I have acquired the virtues of patience, self-reliance and self respect and have also learned to manage money inde-pendently — Bikramjit Singh Kohli, class IX, Modern School, Delhi

Boarding is more fun than day school. You are always with friends. There are great opportunities for study as well as games like boxing, hockey or rugby. The only thing I terribly miss is home food — Alfred Chesney, class IX, La Martiniere School, Kolkata

Sometimes, at lights out, I wished I would never wake up to hear the chhota hazri bell. For days after I left I thought of school as a kind of jungle, and look back on it with a shudder — author Vikram Seth (A Suitable Boy), former Doon School student

Familiar and yet unresolved arguments about the independence and self-reliance which boarding schools confer upon students from an early age apart, a compelling rationale which prompts a growing number of thoughtful couples to opt for boarding school education for their children is deteriorating civic conditions in urban India. With increasingly smaller homes, local school and public playgrounds becoming a rarity, traffic choking city roads and the lead oxide levels in the air rising continuously, it’s hardly surprising that families, especially from metros such as Mumbai and Delhi which can afford newgen boarding schools sited in cool green environs, are opting for them with enthusiasm.

Prabhakar (left): sports facilities edge
"Here in Mumbai even getting to a playground requires travelling some distance and going to sports classes after school requires considerable planning and logistics. On the other hand in Bishop’s School, Pune where my 12-year old son Nishant has been for the past two years, a whole range of sports facilities and options are available right on his doorstep. In a residential school one doesn’t have to enroll for a particular sport; Nishant can try them all and decide which one or more suits him. That’s a valuable part of education," says Sunil Prabhakar, the Mumbai-based director of the Indian Hotels’ Taj Land’s End Hotel. Adds Nishant’s mother Anita, a personnel recruitment consultant: "There are other benefits too. Nishant used to be a shy and withdrawn child, but in the past two years, his confidence and independence has shot up remarkably."

Yet if despite their proven advantages, liberal-minded parents are hesitant to enroll their children in traditional or avant garde boarding schools, a latter-day factor is that the quality of education dispensed by day schools has improved considerably, because they attract better teachers who tend to prefer metropolitan cities. According to S.C. Arora vice-chairman of the newly promoted Lotus Valley International School, Noida (outer Delhi), a substantial number of high quality day schools have sprung up on the peripheries of the metros which surpass residential schools in terms of the quality of education offered. "In particular the best teachers in the all-important higher secondary schools — classes XI and XII — prefer to work in day schools where salaries are higher, and there are opportunities for augmenting incomes through private tuition. Therefore the quality of education provided at the Plus Two stage and preparing students for all-India college entrance exams such as IIT-JEE, and to medical school tends to be better in day schools. Hence the hesitation of a growing number of parents to send children to boarding schools," explains Arora.

Venkatachalam & family: better quality day schools
The reality that the quality of academic, if not extra-curricular education, being dispensed by hitherto scorned metropolitan day schools in particular has improved dramatically during the past few decades is confirmed by several knowledgeable individuals who are nostalgic about their boarding school experiences. M. M. Venkatachalam a Chennai-based director of the Murugappa Group (EID Parry, Tube Industries, TI Cycles etc) describes his years at the Lawrence School, Lovedale as "greatly memorable and enjoyable". Nevertheless his two sons are enrolled in the AMM Matriculation Senior Secondary School, Chennai — a day school. "One reason is that there is a greater choice of good schools in the cities these days and the other is that my wife Lakshmi wanted to keep the children at home," says Venkatachalam.

The perception that hitherto poor cousin day schools have upgraded their facilities and standards to emerge as viable alternatives to blue-chip traditional and newgen boarding schools, is also shared by Rekha Bhargava, a Delhi-based nursery school teacher who was a boarder at the Birla Balika Vidyapeeth, Pilani, Rajasthan for nine years. But her own children are enrolled in Apeejay Delhi, a day school.

Bhargava: disturbing reports
"The quality of day schools has improved considerably in recent times and they are much better equipped to handle the academic and extra-curricular needs of children. Most schools now offer excellent day care or day boarding facilities which makes it possible for working parents to leave them in school for the full day instead of packing them off to boarding school. Simultaneously boarding schools, especially the newer ones have become very expensive. Despite this we keep hearing disturbing reports of unkempt hostels and poor food in boarding schools across the country. Even renowned institutions such as Doon and Welham aren’t the same any longer," laments Bhargava.

Quite obviously for differing reasons, many upper middle and affluent parents who several decades ago wouldn’t have thought twice about it, have mixed feelings about the pros and cons of boarding school education. With the arrival on the secondary scene of a rash of newgen residential schools offering all the comforts of home and green cards to the best foreign universities, the older, British-model boarding schools known for the cold showers, brutal ragging and the lash have quite evidently lost their shine. Yet the major factor which keeps them going is the rapidly declining quality of life in the nation’s crumbling cities which prompts parents to send children away to more salubrious and child-friendly schools in the hills, and the sociological phenomenon of the multiplying number of twin-career families. And if the shiny newgen boarding schools are also beginning to lose some of their sheen, it’s being attributed to teacher shortages and academic disappointment despite astronomically high fees.

Yet at bottom, disillusionment with boarding school education is an indicator that supply side economics has begun to work. The upside of the new, luxurious boarding schools which have generated considerable excitement within the drawing rooms of the rich and famous is that there is greater slack in the system and wider consumer choice. The days when children had to be registered into the few top boarding schools on birth because of huge demand for admissions are fast fading. And not only because of the arrival of the newgen residential schools, but also because day schools have sharply upgraded facilities and academic standards.

"I don’t believe that the charm and mystique of boarding schools is fading. It’s just that the appeal of the traditional boarding school is declining with the entry of modern residential schools which not only offer better facilities in terms of accommodation and extra-curricular activities, but more academic options as well. Now the ‘consumers’ of quality education have a wider choice which hasn’t gone down well with the old boys lobby of traditional boarding schools," says Vinay Pande an alumnus of Lucknow and Annamalai universities and former senior master at the Doon School and Lawrence, Sanawar who is the incumbent headmaster of the state-of-the-art Sarla Birla Academy, Bangalore which was inaugurated with great fanfare on June 11. Sprawled over 67 acres on the outskirts of Bangalore and constructed at a cost of Rs.50 crore, SBA is a wholly residential boys’ school which has admitted 128 class V-VIII students following the IB and CBSE syllabuses.

Sarala Birla Academy’s Pande (centre): wider choice phenomenon
Even as the age-old debate over the merits and demerits of boarding school education has acquired a new intensity in the new indisputably American century, almost imperceptible currents of change have swept over non-government secondary — especially boarding school education. Though the number of these schools is barely 10,000 across the country, these institutions which educate the children of the influential middle class and the establishment, exercise a benchmarking influence on secondary education which is in inverse proportion to their number. Therefore the emergence of competition within this segment with the advent of a plethora of newgen boarding and day schools is certain to result in the upgradation of standards of school education across the board.

Against the backdrop of a rising groundswell in favour of a common school system across the country and the establishment of boarding school benchmarked Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (see cover story), the emergence of a spirit of competition within the secondary school system is a good augury for the future development of Indian education.

With Gaver Chatterjee (Mumbai); Meenakshi Venkat (Delhi); Vidya Pandit (Lucknow); Amrita Modal (Kolkata) & Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)