Bangalore’s top pre-primaries 2015

To rate and rank the garden city’s most reputable proprietary, franchised and pre-primaries of composite schools, 614 parents, principals and teachers were interviewed by C fore field researchers. Here are Bangalore’s top pre-primaries for the year 2015: In the peninsular garden city of Bangalore/Bengaluru (pop.11 million), fast living up to its ‘garbage city’ image for the inability of the state government and its corrupt municipal corporation to process the 4,000 tonnes of wet and dry garbage the city generates every day, and regulate traffic-choked streets, professionally administered early childhood care and education (ECCE) is a high priority. Before it acquired its recent dubious reputation under the rule of venal rustic politicians with little awareness of the importance of town planning, Bangalore — renamed Bengaluru to pander to rural sub-nationalism — was perhaps the most well-planned and administered city countrywide which with its equable climate, was indeed a garden city. Thus, it attracted a steady flow of foreign investment into its non-polluting IT (information technology) industry with several IT multinationals including Texas Instruments, Microsoft and Dell establishing large back offices in the city. And with Indian IT majors Infosys, TCS and Wipro also striking roots in the city, Bangalore earned itself the reputation of India’s Silicon Valley. Unsurprisingly, well-educated and well-travelled professionals — particularly in dual income households — employed in the IT industry whose number is estimated at over 1 million, highly value professionally delivered ECCE for their children. Therefore the garden city hosts an estimated 1,500 pre-primary schools of all shapes and sizes at all price points. To rate and rank its most reputable owned/proprietary, franchised and pre-primaries of composite K-10/12 schools across 10 parameters of ECCE excellence, field researchers of C fore interviewed 614 sample respondents comprising 523 parents with children in preschools, and 91 principals, teachers and educationists. Responses of principals of some top-ranked preschools and league tables ranking them inter se in each category are given below. Owned/Proprietary Ranked Bangalore’s #1 for three years consecutively (2011-13) and ahead of all pre-primaries of the garden city, the pioneer Head Start Montessori House of Children, Koramangala (HSM, estb.1984) was pipped at the post last year by the mint new Indus Early Learning Centre (IELC), promoted by the management of the upscale Indus International School which has built itself a formidable national reputation by topping the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings in the international day-cum-boarding category for four years in succession. But this year after your editors took the decision to segregate pre-primaries into three categories — owned, franchised and pre-primaries of composite K-10/12 schools — which resulted in IELC migrating to the composite K-12 schools category, HSM has regained its #1 position in the owned/proprietary category. “I am very happy that the discerning public of Bangalore has appreciated our role in the field of early education. Being ranked #1 on the parameters of special needs education and innovative teaching is very encouraging for our dedicated teachers and staff. I believe the two are connected and mutually reinforcing,” says Samina…