India’s best international day-cum-boarding schools 2023-24

Day-cum-boarding schools offer a win-win proposition: day scholars benefit from the excellent infrastructure and sports facilities built for boarders, the latter by way of student body diversity. Therefore it’s unsurprising that the number of international day-cum-boarding schools is rising countrywide year on year. International day-cum-boarding schools are the glamour section of the annual EW India School Rankings. Sited on sprawling campuses bristling with state-of-the-art infrastructure on the outskirts of metros and big cities, they admit day scholars and boarders, and offer transformative pedagogies, academic, co-curricular and sports education facilities of global standards and high-quality teachers, often expatriate headmasters. Another win-win proposition is that day scholars benefit from the excellent infrastructure and sports facilities built for boarders, the latter by way of student body diversity. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that the number of international day-cum-boarding schools countrywide is rising year on year. Against 28 schools ranked in this category in 2016-17, the number has risen to 45 in EWISR 2023-24. Moreover, their increasing popularity within the country’s upper middle class has prompted globally renowned foreign boarding schools to set up shop in India. Last month, Harrow School (estb.1572), the world-famous British boys boarding school which has 12 campuses worldwide, inaugurated its first India co-ed boarding campus in Bengaluru in partnership with the Amity Group, offering day and weekly boarding options. Likewise, Wellington College, another venerable British boarding school (estb.1853), inaugurated a day-cum-boarding campus in Pune on September 14, in partnership with the Dehradun-based Unison Group. Since they are barely a few months old, these mint-new day-cum-boarding schools have not been included in the EWISR 2023-24 field survey which concluded in July-August. However, they are likely to disrupt the league table of India’s best international day-cum-boarding schools next year. Meanwhile, the EWISR 2023-24 league table of international day-cum-boarding schools has a placid deja vu about it. This year’s 18,928 sample respondents polled by the Delhi-based Centre for Forecasting and Research (C fore) have again voted Indus International School, Bengaluru India’s #1 international day-cum-boarding school awarding it the highest score among all categories of international schools, followed by Pathways World School, Gurgaon, ranked #2 jointly with The International School Bangalore and Greenwood High International, Bengaluru at #3. Despite the International Baccalaureate (IB)-affiliated Indus International School, Bengaluru (IIS-B, estb.2003) having topped this category for over a decade, principal Sarojini Rao expresses delight that IIS-B is ranked India #1 for the 12th consecutive year with top scores under the parameters of teacher welfare and development, leadership/management quality, community service and curriculum and pedagogy across all categories of international schools. “The unique proposition of IIS-B is that we are continuously innovating to become future-ready. IIS-B is one of 13 schools worldwide and only one in India selected by IB to partner with OECD countries for education innovation. We are the first school in India to introduce robots as teaching assistants in classrooms, design a unique entrepreneurial skills development curriculum and set up a fully-fledged research unit to study education best practices. Our top score for teacher development…