Affiliated with CIE (UK) and IBO (Geneva) — the world’s premier school-leaving examination boards — Canadian International School, Bangalore (estb. 1996) has acquired an excellent reputation for rigorous academics, sports and co-curricular education – Paromita Sengupta Set in a 15-acre campus shielded by silver oak and eucalyptus trees in north Bangalore’s fast-growth suburb of Yelahanka, the Canadian International School (CIS, estb.1996) recently concluded its year-long 20th anniversary celebrations with the formal inauguration of a state-of-the-art 470-seat auditorium and a first-of-its-kind solar energy project. Over the past two decades, this low-profile full school affiliated with the Cambridge International Examinations (CIE), UK and International Baccalaureate Organisation, Geneva (IBO) — the world’s premier school-leaving international exam boards — has steadily built a national reputation for rigorous academics, internationalism and excellent sports and extra-curricular education. In the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2016, CIS is ranked among India’s Top 12 and Karnataka’s Top 5 international day-cum-boarding schools. Currently, this co-educational pre-nursery to class XII school has an aggregate enrolment of 686 students from 40 countries — including 86 boarders — instructed by 102 well-qualified and diverse teachers of whom 43 percent have worked/trained abroad. CIS was promoted in 1996 by Canadian entrepreneurs Jonathan and Bernard Goodman on a modest campus in Hebbal with three students. In 2002, the Canadian promoters’ trust was acquired by Sterling Developers, the well-known Bangalore-based real estate company which immediately started construction of a new multipurpose campus in Yelahanka in suburban Bangalore. The school shifted to its new campus in 2006. “Since Sterling Developers took over the school, we have taken great pains to transform CIS into a full-fledged 21st-century international school. To this end, we built a contemporary ICT-enabled campus and invested heavily in teacher training, curriculum development, internationalism and ensured our students had access to a wide range of sports and co-curricular activities. Our objective is to build a culture of holistic development and produce leaders who can compete successfully in a challenging global environment,” says Shweta Sastri, a business management graduate of the London School of Economics who took charge as executive director of CIS when the school moved to its new campus a decade ago. To fulfill its institutional goal of nurturing global leaders, CIS offers the classes I-X syllabus of the UK-based CIE — the world’s largest school examinations board — and class XI-XII students the rigorous IB diploma programme. “In CIS, we are committed to nurturing a community of lifelong learners by blending academic rigour with sports and co-curricular education. The factor that differentiates us from other international schools is our unique contextual learning programme which empowers and enables students to learn experientially by exploring global and local issues to search for solutions, meet people, discover new places and discuss new ideas,” says Shane Kells, an education alumnus of Canada’s Alberta and Australia’s New England universities with teaching and admin experience of international schools in Canada, Thailand, China and Korea who was appointed head of school in 2011. Given this strong enabling and exploratory learning…
