The number of preschools included in the proprietary and franchised league tables of the garden city, Bangalore — fast transforming into garbage city — is 113, highest of the 16 urban habitats covered by the EW India Preschool Rankings 2019-20. Awareness of the value and importance of professionally administered early childhood care and education (ECCE) is arguably highest in the southern city of Bangalore (pop.12 million), aka Silicon Valley of India. The number of preschools included in the proprietary and franchised league tables of the garden city — fast transforming into garbage city — is 113, highest of the 16 urban habitats covered by the EW India Preschool Rankings 2019-20. With India’s Silicon Valley hosting a large number of well-qualified professionals employed within its IT and ITES (IT enabled services) companies, the demand for professionally administered early childhood care and education (ECCE) is on the upswing. Therefore, pre-primary schools delivering globally benchmarked ECCE, which is mercifully exempt from the regulatory supervision of Karnataka’s infamously corrupt education ministry inspectors, have proliferated in all neighbourhoods of this bustling metropolis. Intense competition between them has raised the standard of privately dispensed pre-primary education to high levels of excellence. To compile the EW Bangalore Preschool Rankings 2019-20 league tables, field personnel of the Delhi-based market research and opinion polls company Centre for Forecasting & Research (C fore) persuaded 694 parents with preschool-going children and 122 ECCE teachers/principals of Bangalore, to rate the city’s sufficiently well-known proprietary and franchised preschools (preschools rated by less than 30 sample respondents are excluded from the league tables) on ten parameters of ECCE excellence including teacher competence, teacher welfare and development, infrastructure, individual attention to students, value for money, parental involvement, innovative teaching, safety and hygiene, leadership quality and special needs education. Bangalore’s best preschools 2019-20 (PROPRIETARY) Last ranked #1 in 2015-16, the Indus Early Learning Centre, Whitefield (IELCW) has regained its #1 rank after a three-year hiatus besting Head Start Montessori, Koramangala ranked #1 last year and Neev, Indiranagar, ranked #1 in 2017-18. Jointly ranked #4 in 2018-19, Greenwood High Preschool, Whitefield and Indus Early Learning Centre, Koramangala are jointly ranked #3 this year. “We are euphoric about IELCW regaining its natural #1 rank in the latest EW league table of Bangalore’s best preschools. I ascribe the excellent public reputation IELCW enjoys among Bangalore’s young parents to our child-friendly curriculum which integrates best international ECCE practices,” says Priyanka Khurana, head of IELCW, promoted in 2011 by the Bangalore-based Indus Trust which also owns and manages the highly acclaimed IB-affiliated Indus International schools in Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Pune — all ranked among the Top 10 international day-cum-boarding schools in the EW India School Rankings 2019-20. Currently, IELCW has 120 students and 19 teachers on its muster rolls. Khurana is especially pleased that IELCW has been given top score on seven of the ten parameters of ECCE excellence including teacher competence, teacher welfare and development, infrastructure, innovative teaching and parental involvement. “Our carefully selected teachers are rigorously trained to deliver…
