Gurgaon’s most admired preschools

To meet the demand for high-quality early childhood education from Gurgaon’s growing pool of professionals employed in the manufacturing, IT/ITES among other industries, new-age pre-primaries have proliferated in this satellite city Since 1981 when Maruti Suzuki Ltd, India’s #1 automobile company established its first manufacturing unit in Gurgaon (pop.876,900), this satellite city of Delhi — sited in Haryana but included in the Delhi National Capital Region — has not only attracted industry and business investment in a big way but also edupreneurs who have established several globally benchmarked K-12 schools (GD Goenka, Pathways, Scottish High) and universities (Ashoka, O.P. Jindal). Inevitably, to meet the demand for high-quality early childhood education which prepares children for success in school and higher education from Gurgaon’s growing pool of professionals employed in the manufacturing, IT/ITES among other industries, new-age pre-primaries have proliferated in this satellite city. This year’s league table rating and ranking Gurgaon’s most-reputed preschools is encouraging with the number of sufficiently well-known ranked pre-primaries having almost doubled from 15 in 2015 to 29 in 2018. C fore field researchers interviewed 563 parents and 67 preschool principals of this steel-n-glass city to rank 29 pre-primaries inter se in two categories — owned/proprietary and franchised Owned/proprietary preschools Pallavan, Sohna Road/DLF Phase I (estb.2001), promoted by Arun Kapur, the celebrated director of Delhi’s top-ranked Vasant Valley School, has firmly established itself as the millennium city’s most admired pre-primary. It has been voted Gurgaon’s #1 proprietary pre-primary for the seventh consecutive year. However, this year Pallavan is obliged to share top ranking with Amiown, Sector 27 — promoted by the Amity group — ranked #2 in 2017 and #1 in 2016. They are followed by iDiscoveri XSEED Preschool, Sector 46 at #2 which has retained its last year’s ranking. Storming into the Top 5 are several debutants: Anand Preschool, DLF Phase I at #3, Little Pearls, Cyber City ranked #4 jointly with Shalom Hills Preschool, Sushant Lok and The Shri Ram Early Years, Aravali Junior Campus #5. Renu Kaul, director of the Pallavan schools in Sohna Road and DLF Phase I, is “deeply satisfied” that this two-unit school has retained its apex ranking with top scores under the parameters of teacher competence and development, leadership quality, value for money, and infrastructure provision. “We are very happy to have lived up to the expectations of your informed sample respondents. At Pallavan, we are constantly striving to better ourselves to ensure that our children get the best they deserve in the short time that they are with us. However, although we are delighted with our top scores for teacher competence and development, I believe our distinguishing feature is our simplicity and values-based education philosophy which puts children at the centre of teaching-learning. We love and enjoy our children and let them grow and learn naturally in a care-free environment,” says Kaul, an alumna of Delhi and Toronto universities with 13 years of experience in Vasant Valley and Springdales schools prior to being appointed director of Pallavan in 2001.…