Gurukul The School, Ghaziabad

Established in 2002, GTS-G has swiftly developed into a progressive CBSE-affiliated K-12 school ranked among the Top 25 in Delhi NCR in the EW India School Rankings 2021-22 writes Autar Nehru. Sited on a 10-acre state-of-the-art campus off the Delhi-Meerut Expressway in Ghaziabad (pop.2 million), Gurukul The School, Ghaziabad (GTS-G, estb.2002) has swiftly developed into a progressive 21st century school providing highly qualified teachers, tech-enabled pedagogies, rich sports and co-curricular education and excellent student learning outcomes. In the latest EW India School Rankings 2021-22, GTS-G is ranked among the Top 3 co-ed day schools of Ghaziabad and among the Top 25 in Delhi NCR. Affiliated with the Delhi-based CBSE, this 20-year-old school has an enrolment of 2,055 students tutored by 162 well-trained teachers. An engineering graduate of Pune’s Savitribai Phule University, Sachin Vats, founder-director of GTS-G, says the prime objective behind the school’s promotion two decades ago was to provide children of the fast-expanding city of Ghaziabad access to internationally benchmarked K-12 education. “During my school days, I had to travel 30 km daily to Delhi/Noida for good quality education. Years later, this memory prompted me to establish a school which would offer the best infrastructure, pedagogies and teachers. This pursuit of excellence combined with my philosophy of offering education blending ‘modernity with values’ has enabled us to develop GTS-G into a high-quality institution in a short span of time,” says Vats, who started GTS-G with a first batch of 50 students in 2002 under the aegis of Gurukul Education Society. Today, this school receives five admission applications for every seat in nursery. Vats is especially pleased with the school’s response during the Covid-19 pandemic prompted 82-weeks closure, which has earned GTS-G “great trust and appreciation” of its parents community. Immediately after the lockdown of schools was announced in March 2020, GTS-G switched to online platforms such as Google Classroom, Zoom and MS Teams to smoothly transition to digital teaching-learning. Simultaneously, the school’s 162 teachers received intensive training in online teaching-learning pedagogies and ICT (information communication technologies) utilisation. On average, the school’s teachers receive 300 hours of continuous professional development (CPD) annually. “The past two years have been a great learning experience with the school succeeding in developing highly effective online, offline and hybrid teaching-learning models. Our teachers ensured that children’s learning was never disrupted and provided full remedial learning support while our counselors supported students’ mental health and wellbeing,” says Vats. The school management and teachers’ commitment to ensuring learning continuity during the pandemic has paid off by way of excellent results in CBSE school-leaving exams. In the 2020-21 CBSE class XII boards, the GTS-G cohort averaged 92.89 percent and 88.95 percent in the class X board examination. To provide students balanced and integrated education, the school has generously invested in contemporary academic, co-curricular and sports education facilities. The thematically designed ten-acre campus houses a fully air-conditioned building with 93 classrooms equipped with interactive Smart boards supported by optical fibre high speed Internet connectivity; two libraries with 48,000 print…