India’s top-ranked Girls Day Schools

This year the seating arrangement at the Top 10 table is radically different. Ranked a modest #5 in 2015, JB Petit High for Girls, Mumbai (estb. 1860) has been voted #1 followed by La Martiniere for Girls, Kolkata (estb. 1836). Although the great majority of greenfield schools being promoted these days are co-educational, all-girls schools are still preferred by a sizeable number of Indian households for cultural and religious reasons with many all-girls day schools – some of them over 150 years’ vintage – enjoying formidable public reputations. And if Hillary Clinton, an alumna of the all-women Wellesley College, is elected – as seems likely – America’s first woman president, all-girls education institutions may well experience a renaissance. Since the inaugural 2013 all-girls national rankings, two Kolkata schools – Modern High School for Girls and La Martiniere for Girls – have dominated the national league table. However this year. the seating arrangement at the Top 10 table is radically different. Ranked a modest #5 in 2015, the JB Petit High School for Girls, Mumbai (estb.1860) has been voted #1 followed by La Martiniere for Girls, Kolkata. The eastern India sample respondents polled by C fore have also promoted the Modern High School for Girls, Kolkata to #3 (6) followed by Carmel Convent, Chandigarh (#4), and Loreto House, Middleton, Kolkata (5). Tied at #6 position are St. Mary’s School, Pune and the Rajmata Krishna Kumari Girls Public School, Jodhpur which has risen from #9 last year and is also the #1 all-girls day school in the western state of Rajasthan (pop. 74 million). “We are thrilled that JB Petit, one of the oldest girls’ educational institutions countrywide, has been accorded recognition for the high quality education we have been consistently delivering over the past 156 years. Our mission is empowerment of women through education and opportunity. Therefore, we provide an environment of creativity, freedom and joyous learning in which our students articulate their viewpoints fearlessly and develop courage of their convictions. Recently, we’ve unveiled a master plan for comprehensive redevelopment of the school under which we plan to build, expand and modernise our campus and facilities, and hopefully add an International Baccalaureate section at the Plus Two level. This bold new venture has the full support of Mumbai’s academic community”, says Benaifer P. Kutar, an alumna of SNDT University, Mumbai who signed up as teacher in 1995 and was appointed principal of the school in 2010. Sited in the bustling Fort area, in tony South Mumbai, the vintage JB Petit School has an enrolment of 917 students and 65 teachers. Dr. Devi Kar, the highly-respected director of the CISCE-affiliated Modern High School for Girls, Kolkata (MHSG, estb.1952), has mixed feelings about this schools rollercoaster ride in the EW league tables during the past three years. “It is difficult to forget that EducationWorld ranked us #1 three years ago. So our rank has actually dropped and we have merely ‘improved’ upon our last years ranking. We just cannot fathom the reason for…