On the basis of feedback received from the public, this year boarding schools have been subdivided in discrete categories — boys, girls, and co-ed — to facilitate fair comparison
One of post-independence india’s few great achievements in K-12 education is that despite the leveling-down efforts of professedly socialist governments at the Centre and in the states, the country’s traditional or legacy boarding schools modeled on the best traditions of independent, residential British public schools — Eton, Harrow, Marlborough and Gordo-nstoun among others — are still going strong. Moreover, like their counterparts in the UK and Commonwealth countries, they have changed with the times, and adopting new technologies and pedag-ogies have transformed into excellent institutions of primary-secondary educ-ation. Today, competition for admission into India’s vintage boarding schools — Lawrence, Sanawar and Lovedale; Doon, Bishop Cotton, St. Paul’s, Darjeeling among others — some of whom were established almost two centuries ago, is as intense as it has ever been and all of them have long waiting lists and conduct stiff entrance exams.
Indeed, so great has been the hold of legacy boarding schools on the imagi-nation of India’s rising middle class that despite official discouragement, new schools of this genre have continued to be promoted during the past six decades since independence. With India’s cities in precipitous decline and transforming into crime-ridden health hazard zones, a growing number of upwardly mobile middle class parents are favouring the option of packing off children to legacy boarding and/or new genre high-end international boarding schools, usually sited on sprawling, unpolluted campuses offering excellent facilities for co-curricular and sports education. Altho-ugh it’s fashionable in some circles to disparage legacy boarding schools as an elitist colonial hangover, the editors of EducationWorld don’t subscribe to this prejudice. On the contrary, we respect and value them for providing high-quality holistic education at numerous price points, and for setting high benchmarks in school education.
During the past seven years, the EducationWorld India School Rankings presented public assessment and eval-uation of all boarding schools without segregation or distinction. Thus all-boys, all-girls and co-educational boar-ding schools and even a few where day scholars constituted a majority, were lumped together for purposes of rating and ranking inter se. However on the basis of feedback received from the public and considerable internal debate, this year we have subdivided boarding schools in discrete categories — boys, girls and co-ed — and created a new category of day-cum-boarding schools i.e. essentially day schools which also offer residential accommodation. The rationale of this subdivision is that each category poses unique challenges and requires differing management skill-sets.