India’s premier co-ed boarding schools 2015

The media shy Rishi Valley School, Madanapalle which had been ranked the country™s #1 co-ed boarding school for four of the past five years has regained its #1 rank Within India™s legacy boarding schools sector, co-ed primary-secondaries substantially outnumber single sex institutions, undoubtedly a sign of progress towards gender egalitarianism. In this highly competitive segment, the country™s organic swamiji schools, which offer a combination of progressive, new-age western liberal arts education combined with the best strains of traditional Indian philosophy and wisdom, have begun to dominate the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) during the past quinquennium. In particular, the media shy Rishi Valley School, Madanapalle (RVS), founded in the Silverton Hills of Andhra Pradesh by philosopher, educationist and seer Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) in 1926, has captured the imagination of India™s upper middle class SECA (socio-economic category A), who constitute the majority of the 11,660-strong database of sample respondents who rated and ranked India™s 1,000 most reputed schools for EWISR 2015. RVS ” a pioneer in environment friendly (aka sustainable development) education ” has been ranked the country™s #1 co-ed boarding school for four of the past five years. Surprisingly, last year™s sample respondents voted the Sahyadri School, Pune (estb. 1995), also promoted by the Chennai-based Krishnamurti Foundation, highest in this segment. However this year RVS has regained its #1 ranking, while the Sahyadri School is ranked a modest #6. Moreover, a twist in this year™s narrative is that another swamiji primary-secondary ” the class V-XII Chinmaya International Residential School, Coimbatore (CIRS, estb. 1996), which was ranked #4 in 2014 ” has stormed to second position in this year™s co-ed boarding schools all-India league table. It™s worth noting that both these schools are the highest ranked academically with an actual 92 percent average in the class XII ISC examination of the Delhi-based Council for the Indian School Certificate Examination (CISCE) as per data compiled by the Hyderabad-based education website www.thelearningpoint.net. Because of the irrational refusal of the pan-India CISCE and CBSE boards to provide school exams performance data, thelearningpoint.net collated and compiled this information from various sources and provided it to EducationWorld (see national league table last column). Although highly respected nationwide and ranked India™s premier co-ed boarding school for four of the past five years, the management of Rishi Valley School tends to be lukewarm about the high ranking the SECA respondents of successive EWISR surveys confer upon this 79-year-old institution. œI am happy the parameters on which we have been rated high are considered important by the (survey) respondents, and it™s nice to know the school is generally well thought of. But the rankings don™t matter and we have always downplayed them, says Siddhartha Menon an alumnus of Delhi University and IGNOU, who signed up with RVS in 1991 as a maths and English teacher and is currently the low-profile principal of the school. Unimpressed by the top ratings given to RVS on nine of the 14 parameters and expressing œperturbation about œthe increasingly widespread tendency to rank…