EW India School Rankings 2023-24 (Part-II)

Last month (September) in Part I of EWISR 2023-24, we featured league tables rating and ranking over 3,000 day schools. In this issue we present national, state and parameter league tables of boarding schools (co-ed, boys and girls), international (day, day-cum-boarding and wholly residential), vintage legacy, government, special needs, philanthropy and budget private schools, writes Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen    Innovated and introduced in 2007, over the past 16 years, the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) has steadily improved and evolved into the world’s — yes, world’s — largest and most in-depth primary-secondary schools ratings and rankings survey. The uniqueness of EWISR is that institutional rankings are based on careful evaluation of 14 discrete parameters of school education excellence. Moreover, schools are grouped within their own categories to eliminate apples and oranges type comparisons. For instance, co-ed day-cum-boarding schools are ranked with each other and not with day boys or girls schools. By the same logic, all ranked schools are divided under the umbrella categories of day, boarding and international schools. And last year we added another classification of vintage or legacy schools — over 90 years vintage — which are ranked inter se under each category/sub-category for similar reasons. For principals, teachers, and educators, the annual EWISR is important and of interest because it enables them to learn the reputation of their school in relation to competitor institutions. For parents the annual EWISR is important because it may influence a change of institution to ensure their children are in schools that best develop their special aptitudes.   Another special feature of the annual EWISR is that it is a national survey based on field interviews. Ab initio, your editors resisted availing the easy option of constituting a jury of eminent educationists and enclosing them in a room to award scores under our chosen parameters of excellence and total the scores to rank schools. We were aware that with education being accorded low priority by government and the media — EW, launched in 1999 with the mission to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”, was the first news and features periodical in this space — there was sparse awareness even among experienced educationists about schools beyond their bailiwicks. Therefore, we chose the more painstaking — and expensive — option of engaging the services of Delhi-based Centre for Forecasting & Research Pvt. Ltd (C fore, estb.2000), a highly reputed market research and opinion polls company, to conduct field interviews with 16,000-18,000 educationists, principals, teachers and parents countrywide to rate and rank schools in their regions under chosen parameters of primary-secondary education excellence. Since then over the past 16 years, the annual EWISR based on this elaborate methodology — which eliminates subjectivity and bias to the maximum extent possible — of rating and ranking over 4,000 of the country’s primary-secondaries in over a dozen separate categories and under 14 parameters of excellence, has evolved into the gold standard of school…