The annual EW Preschool Rankings generate considerable excitement and enthusiasm in the IT city which boasts a large number of double-income households of young parents. Here are Bangalore’s top-ranked pre-primaries: The ICT capital of the country, the once garden city of Bangalore (renamed Bengaluru in 2014 by language chauvinist politicians with total disregard for the brand equity the IT city enjoys around the world), hosts a large population estimated at 1 million engineers and software professionals employed by transnational IT/ICT companies such as Infosys Technologies and Wipro which have their head offices in the city, as also of other IT industry behemoths such as TCS and HCL. In addition, almost all major multi-billion dollar American IT multinationals including Microsoft, Dell and Texas Instruments among others, have established their India offices in Bangalore. This agglomeration of IT companies in this now overcrowded metro (pop. 9 million) with huge road traffic management problems, plus the social phenomenon of double-income households explains the large and rising number of pre-primary schools springing up on almost every street corner of the city. Mercifully spared the overweening attention of government education inspectors with perennially itching palms because politicians and bureaucrats have yet to cotton on to the importance of ECCE, private preschools of all shapes and sizes offering creche to education services at all price points are mushrooming in Bangalore. Moreover, since their success is driven by reputation, the annual EW Preschool Rankings generate considerable excitement and enthusiasm within the teaching and parents communities of the city. Proprietary Pre-primaries This year there’s considerable rearrangement of seats at the Top 10 table of proprietary preschools mainly because of the entry of several pre-primaries of the Neev chain. Although Neev, Indiranagar (estb. 2005) has been ranked among the Top 5 since 2011 and is top-ranked this year, Neev, Whitefield and Neev, Koramangala are ranked #4 and #5. Consequently, the duopoly of the pioneer Head Start Montessori, Koramangala (estb. 1984) and the new genre Indus Early Learning Centre, Whitefield of the annual EW Bangalore Preschool Rankings has ended, with the latter obliged to share its #3 rank with Greenwood High Preschool, Whitefield this year. Kavita Sabharwal, an alumna of the Harvard Business School, who established the first globally-benchmarked Neev, Indiranagar in 2005 and has since multiplied the number of Neev preschools in Bangalore to five with an aggregate enrolment of 600 children mentored by 150 highly-trained early childhood educators, is delighted that three Neev pre-primaries are ranked among the city’s Top 5. “I believe the good reputation that Neev pre-primaries enjoy among young parents in Bangalore is due to our self-designed syllabus grounded in experiential learning and multiple intelligences theory, and the structured, written online and offline training curriculum which we persistently deliver to our teachers. As a result, we have developed a great team of innovative teachers always ready to experiment because they are provided strong scaffolding,” says Sabharwal, who has since ventured into primary-secondary education with the promotion of the IBO-affiliated class I-XII Neev Academy, Bangalore. Priti…
