For the EW-C fore India’s Most Admired Preschools Survey 2011, 1,731 respondents comprising SECA parents with at least one child in preschool, principals and teachers in six major cities, where there is growing awareness of the vital importance of quality preschool education, were polled. Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen report
Hitherto regarded as an informal, if not inconsequential, sector in the education continuum, formal preschool or preparatory learning for children in the age group two-six has acquired a new aura, and is impacting itself upon the collective conscious of India’s 300 million-strong middle class and the community of informed educators. With the emergence of a global consensus on the importance of early childhood education (ECE), the era when ECE was regarded as a period during which toddlers were herded into colourful crèches to socialise and play aimlessly is fast becoming history.
Even the Union ministry of human resources development, which is invariably way behind the curve in matters relating to new trends and pedagogies in education, has awoken to the critical importance of qualitative ECE. But typically, its response is to prepare the ground for bringing the country’s estimated 50,000 private and hitherto unregulated preschools which are mushrooming in urban India, under its stifling control. According to the Delhi-based Indalytics Advisors Pvt. Ltd, which publishes Education Business (September 2011), the HRD ministry is all set to bring the thus far miraculously unregulated preschool sector under its supervisory ambit.
The justification of HRD bureaucrats is that in the absence of any regulation thus far, ECE has become a big business with more than 50,000 preschools — the great majority of them mere crèches and play schools which have sprouted in gardens, garages and residential habitations including tiny flats — levying high tuition fees without providing structured, formal curriculums and taking sufficient child safety precau-tions. Yet as everyone with any awareness of the subterranean motiva-tions and dynamics of the Indian economy knows, the real reason for government and HRD policymakers’ interest in preschool education which is almost an exclusively urban pheno-menon, is that the aggregate annual revenue of the country’s preschools sector is set to cross the $1 billion (Rs.5,000 crore) threshold in 2012, according to the Mumbai-based market research and analysis firm CLSA India.
Quite obviously, the politician-bureaucracy kleptocracy, which has masterminded the smooth migration of the licence-permit-quota regimen from industry into education following the liberalisation and deregulation of Indian industry in 1991, wants a slice of the preschool pie which, according to CLSA is growing at 35 percent per year.
The booming private preschool education sector has attracted the attention of the Central and state educracy (which should properly focus its attention on the 1.2 million angan-wadis or government preschools-cum-pre and post maternal care centres for which the Union Budget 2011-12 has provided a grudging sum of Rs.10,330 crore) also because freedom from government controls and supervision has latterly prompted the entry of several heavyweight corporates and entrepreneurs into early childhood education, mainly under the franchise model. Among them: Kidzee (700 preschools countrywide); Kangaroo Kids (118); EuroKids (800); I Play I Learn (125); Little Millennium (formerly Roots to Wings, 250) and Shemrock (100).
Coterminously specialised education services companies such as iDiscoveri Education and Neev Schools have ventured into preschool education by promoting high-quality, globally benchmarked, proprietorial (as opposed to franchised) preschools in metro cities. Moreover, several offshore ECE providers, notably the Singapore-based Knowledge Universe — the world’s largest proprietorial preschools company which owns 1,740 ECE institutions in the US; 123 in the UK and 40 in Singapore — are set to enter the booming Indian market for early childhood education.
“Although the importance of ECE or preschool education for children in the two-six age group has been acknowledged by the metropolitan middle class for several decades, in the past three-five years this awareness has percolated down to tier-II and tier-III cities and towns across the country. The gradual breakdown of the joint family system and availability of quality branded preschool education with structured curriculums and stand-ardised infrastructure in most urban neighbourhoods, has stimulated demand for preparatory preschool education. As a result, enrolment has been rising by 35-40 percent per year,” says Prajodh Rajan, chief executive of the Mumbai-based EuroKids International Ltd, which runs 800 EuroKids preschools countrywide with an aggregate enrolment of 55,000 pupils under the franchise model, and as such is the largest preschool education corporate in India.
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Although leftist and jholawalla intellectuals, who dominate India’s academic discourse, are unlikely to agree, rising awareness of the impor-tance of ECE within middle class peer groups and nuclear family units, is in the national interest, because it provides infants with a stable foundation to make the best of their primary, secondary and ultimately, higher education. “Study after study over the past decade in particular clearly demonstrates that a dollar invested in early childhood education generates a much higher return than a dollar invested in other education sectors. Investment in the social and emotional stability of children ensures that cognitive development will proceed unabated. A recent study published in Science in June this year, which tracked more than 1,400 individuals in the US measuring their career progression and well-being over 25 years, indicates that those who received formal ECE beginning at age three — as opposed to children who began learning at the usual school commencement age — showed higher levels of educational attainment, socio-economic status, and job skills as well as lower rates of substance abuse, delinquency, criminal conviction and imprisonment,” says Dr. Jeremy Williams, the chief academic officer of the Singapore-based Knowledge Universe. Also a business manage-ment academic and chief executive of the Asian International College, Singapore, Williams will be one of the keynote speakers at EducationWorld’s forth-coming Second Global ECE Conference scheduled for December in Mumbai.
The relevance and benefits of early childhood care — even if not quite education — was acknowledged by the Union government as far back as 1978 when the nationwide Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) was launched under which it was proposed to establish an anganwadi (mother and child care centre) for every habitation with over 400 households. Each anganwadi was to be provided with a trained teacher, an assistant, play materials, joyful learning kits, minimum furniture and a hygienic environment, along with healthcare and nutrition to pregnant and lactating women. Latest available official data reveals that 1.05 million anganwadis were operational countrywide, established under 6,284 projects as on March 31, 2007.
“In a country with 65 percent of the population residing in rural areas, more than 30 percent of the urban population living in slums, 180 million households below the poverty line, 300 million agriculture and construction workers living in nuclear families with both parents working the whole day, the Anganwadi Centres Programme is a highly commendable initiative. However it’s important to note that there is no provision for reading, writing and arithmetic in anganwadi centres. This is a basic school readiness programme for healthy development of infants with emphasis on healthcare, supplementary nutrition, referral services, development of communication, emotional and social skills. Anganwadis cannot be compared to urban preschools where children of the elite are prepared to compete in a competitive society,” says Dr. A.S. Seetharamu, former professor of education at the Institute of Social and Economic Change (ISEC, estb.1972) and currently education advisor to the Karnataka government.
As awareness of early childhood education as the vital foundation for primary, secondary and higher education permeates into all sections of society, clearly the challenge before educationists and educators in the Union HRD ministry and state governments is to rapidly upgrade the country’s 1.20 million anganwadis into full-fledged preschools of the genre established in metropolitan and urban India. With modern, inter-nationally benchmarked preschools promoted under the franchise model spreading into tier-II and tier-III urban habitats, the focus of the Central and state governments should be to transform anganwadis into comprehensive ECE learning centres, rather than interfere with the private preschools sector which is growing suo motu at 35 percent annually.
As government policymakers get set to bring private preschools within their supervisory ambit, there is a real and present danger of replication of the failed effort in primary-secondary education, where government neglect of public (i.e government) schools promoted and (mis)managed at taxp-ayers’ expense, coincident with reckless and motivated interference with private education institutions, has created artificial shortages and opportunities for rents-seeking and corruption.
Against this backdrop, we present EducationWorld’s second set of league tables highlighting the country’s most admired preschools sited in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. The survey to ascertain the best of the best, has been conducted by the Centre for Research and Fore-casting Pvt. Ltd (C fore), the highly-reputed Delhi-based market research agency. Every year C fore conducts field-based research surveys rating and ranking India’s most admired schools, colleges and B-schools for several national publications including EducationWorld, Mint, Outlook and Hindustan Times.
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“This year C fore constituted a sample base of 1,731 comprising SECA parents with at least one child in preschool, teachers and principals across the six metros. Respondents in this sample base were interviewed by over 100 field researchers and asked to rate pre-selected stand-alone preschools on ten parameters inclu-ding faculty competence, infras-tructure, leadership/management quality, individual attention to students, safety and hygiene, special needs facilities etc. Preschools assessed by less than 30 respondents were eliminated from the league tables. The rating scores of all preschools under each parameter were totaled to rank them inter se in each city,” explains Premchand Palety, the promoter chief executive of C fore (estb.2000).
In the pages following we present league tables of the 20 most admired preschools in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad, cities which are in the forefront of the national quality preschools movement. The purpose and intent of the annual EducationWorld-C fore India’s Most Admired Preschools Survey 2011 is to stimulate the multiplication and upgradation of nascent ECE institutions countrywide. This is an essential pre-condition of endowing the vast majority of India’s neglected and short-changed children with a sound foundation for life-long learning.
With Swati Roy & Paromita Sengupta (Bangalore); Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai); Manas Shrivastava (Mumbai); Autar Nehru (Delhi) & Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)