RN Podar School, Mumbai

RN Podar School, Mumbai, RNPS is a top-bracket class I-XII CBSE affiliated co-ed day school in urbs prima indis. Sunayana Nair Founded in 1998, Ramniranjan Podar School (RNPS) is the CBSE-affiliated school of the Mumbai-based Podar Education Network (estb. 1927), run by the Anandilal Podar Trust whose first president was Mahatma Gandhi. Currently the Podar group comprises 57 education institutions concentrated in western (Maharashtra, Gujarat), central (Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh) and southern (Karnataka) India, with an aggregate enrolment of 70,000 students mentored by 4,000 teachers. Clustered in the suburb of Santacruz with several Podar Group schools — Lilavatibai Podar Sr. Secondary School (affiliated with CISCE), Podar International School (IB) and Podar International School (SSC) — RN Podar School, Mumbai is a class I-XII co-ed day school, ranked in the top bracket of schools of urbs prima indis. In the latest EducationWorld India School Rankings 2013, RN Podar School, Mumbai was ranked among the country’s Top 30 (#28) co-ed day schools, #10 in Maharashtra and #8 in Mumbai. Moreover in 2008, CBSE recognised RN Podar School, Mumbai as a centre of excellence, and the school has been involved with content building for the recently introduced CBSE-i (International) curriculum. Affiliated with CBSE since 2000 and CBSE-i (International) since 2011, over the past 15 years RN Podar School, Mumbai has acquired a good reputation in the nation’s commercial capital for innovative use of technology, research and breakthrough processes. “We have consciously and purposively established RN Podar School, Mumbai as a CBSE school because it is the most progressive and dynamic school board of the country, and is constantly introducing education reforms. This poses a huge challenge as well as opportunity for the school to continuously reinvent education processes and practices. Closely involved with the board, we are in the vanguard of 37 CBSE-affiliated schools in Mumbai piloting the board’s new initiatives for other schools to follow,” says Avnita Bir, an economics postgrad of the Delhi School of Economics and a member of CBSE’s governing council who was appointed principal of RNPS in 2003, and prepared the first batches of the formerly state board-affiliated school for CBSE’s class X and XII exams. Since then, RN Podar School, Mumbai students have been performing consistently well in board and other public examinations. In last year’s CBSE exams, 62 of the 180 students who wrote the class X boards averaged 90 percent plus and 148 of the 236 students who wrote the class XII exam averaged more than 90 percent. Earlier in 2012, 44 science stream students from the school were admitted into the country’s 16 IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) which admit a mere 3 percent of the 500,000 students who write the annual IIT-JEE (IIT joint entrance exam). According to Bir, RN Podar School, Mumbai students’ excellent academic performance is because “results-driven high academic benchmarks are non-negotiable” in the school’s teaching-learning culture which is customised to meet the needs of every learner. “We are the first school to introduce the flipped learning model developed in association…