EducationWorld India School Rankings EWISR 2024-25 (Part 1)

This year the field interviews and market research have been conducted by the Bengaluru-based AZ Research Partners which over the past two decades has established an excellent reputation for rigorous market research for clients in India and abroad Even though public K-12 education in post-independence India was foolishly neglected by omniscient central planners and shallow pundits with disastrous consequences — contemporary India is ranked among the world’s poorest and most illiterate countries — somewhat paradoxically, the newly liberated country also hosted a good number of premier boarding schools such as Lawrence Sanawar and Lovedale, The Doon School, Bishop Cotton (Shimla and Bengaluru), Welham Boys (Dehradun), Woodstock, Mussoorie and Kodaikanal International, among others. Yet there was little information in the public domain about these excellent schools, many of them established during the heyday of the British Raj. Well-to-do parents selected premier schools for their children on the basis of word-of-mouth information and/or because of legacy considerations, i.e, they were alumni of these institutions. Little hard information was available to compare and contrast the relative merits of the country’s best schools. Dismayingly, public education — and education in general — continued to remain a back-burner issue for almost half a century until EducationWorld (EW) was launched in 1999 as the country’s first education news and features magazine with the serious mission to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”. Shortly thereafter in 2007, India’s — indeed Asia’s — first education magazine launched the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) to enable parents to assess the relative merits of schools in their cities and beyond, on carefully ideated parameters of primary-secondary education excellence. This enabled them to shortlist, even if not select, schools best aligned to the aptitudes and special intelligences of their children. Since then the annual EWISR presented to the public uninterruptedly for the past 17 years, has been continuously refined and has evolved into the world’s — yes, the world’s — largest and most comprehensive schools ranking survey. This year’s EWISR rates over 4,000 schools under three major heads — day, boarding, and international — and 14 sub-categories (to eliminate apples and oranges type comparisons) in 458 cities and towns across India. The socially beneficial outcome of the annual EWISR which is followed by a gala event staged in Delhi NCR, is that it has totally changed the landscape of K-12 education in India. Top-ranked schools in every sub-category in 458 cities, 28 states and nationally are felicitated and awarded trophies and certificates. Suddenly schools in every category, sub-category, town and city countrywide, are competing to improve scores awarded by knowledgeable national sample respondents under each parameter which when added up determines national, state and city rankings. As has proven time and again in every walk of life, competition is the best incentive to improve quality of goods and services. Inevitably the runaway success of EducationWorld and the annual EWISR has prompted several pretender publications to plagiarise our design, architecture and…