Rohan Bhat
Chairman, Children’s Academy, Mumbai

Rohan Bhat is chairman of the Children’s Academy Group of Schools (CAGS) with three branches in Mumbai and an aggregate enrolment of over 8,000 students. Children’s Academy, Malad and Kandivali are ranked among Mumbai’s Top 10 co-ed day schools in the EW India School Rankings 2020-21.

How satisfied are you with Children’s Academy Schools’ switch to virtual learning over the past year?
We are fortunate to have incrementally introduced IT-enabled learning around five years ago. Today, 15 months into the pandemic we have a comprehensive online programme which also provides co-curricular, sports education and socio-emotional counselling to our students.
Moreover, we have a successful programme of home delivering printed notes, worksheets and science kits to all our 8,000 students to ensure there is some offline learning. Our internal surveys show high level of satisfaction with our online-offline initiatives.

What are the major factors behind the smooth adaptation to online learning of all four Children’s Academy Schools in Mumbai?
From the outset, we took care to ensure that lack of personal digital devices didn’t hinder our students from accessing education. All virtual learning programmes were chosen carefully to ensure they worked on ordinary smartphones with low-bandwidth. Moreover to make certain that some students don’t miss out on an entire day’s learning because of technology glitches, we offer a blend of synchronous and asynchronous learning. Although online classes are conducted, we also send every student pre-recorded videos of the day’s teaching. 20,000 such video modules were prepared and sent to students in the past year.
It’s important to remember that while everyone has suffered during the past 16 months, the quietest voices have been of children. Our CAGS Care team is doing a great job of providing mental health support to children and parents to overcome pandemic anxiety and stress.

Several state governments have passed fee reduction orders in the pandemic year. How have you coped with this financial exigency?
CAGS takes pride in being an empathetic institution. We unilaterally revoked the mutually agreed fees increase of the academic year 2020-21 in April 2020, much before any government order was issued. Moreover in another gesture of goodwill towards parents, we reduced our annual fees by Rs.3,000. Despite this, through tight institutional management we continue to pay full salaries to all teachers and staff. While doing this balancing act hasn’t been easy, we believe it is necessary in this unprecedented pandemic crisis.

What are your plans to deal with future pandemic disruptions?
After a successful year of online teaching-learning, we are beginning to notice signs of fatigue in students. Therefore, in our e-learning programme we will be placing greater emphasis on physical and mental well-being of our children. However, we are hopeful that schools will reopen soon for which eventuality, our schools are fully prepared and compliant with government-mandated Covid-19 safety protocols. We are ready to welcome our students back and get our campuses humming again.

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