EducationWorld India’s Best Day-cum-Boarding Schools 2024-25

Usually sited in green belt peripheries of India’s ill-planned metropolitan cities, day-cum-boarding schools are popular with high-income households in road-traffic choked metros. Moreover they are invariably co-educational, sparing siblings pain of separation. Day-cum-boarding schools which provide the advantage of a wider, more diverse students body as they attract local day scholars and boarders from far-flung cities and small towns and often from abroad, are becoming increasingly popular across the country. They are usually equipped with better infrastructure and sports and games facilities than day schools simpliciter because boarders have to be kept busy and active after school hours. These superior facilities are also accessible to day scholars who as a consequence receive a more well-rounded education than they would otherwise. Day-cum-boarding schools usually sited in green belt peripheries of India’s ill-planned metropolitan cities are also becoming popular among high-income households in road-traffic choked metros. Increasingly, high-income households anxious to spare their progeny the agony of the long daily school bus commute, are enrolling them as weekly boarders who come home every weekend. Moreover, latter-day day-cum-boarding schools are invariably co-educational sparing siblings the pain of separation and offering male children the opportunity to learn gender egalitarianism and respect for girl children from early age. With a new tribe of highly-educated school promoters having entered K-12 education, there’s no change from last year at the very top of the 2024-25 league table comprising 185 most respected day-cum-boarding schools. Emerald Heights International School, Indore (EHIS), and SAI International School, Bhubaneswar (SAIS) retain their joint #1 ranking. Unsurprisingly, Emerald Heights awarded highest scores under the parameters of sports education, infrastructure and special needs education, has 790 boarders from 15 states across the country and six nationalities. Its director Siddharth Singh who took over this modest day school promoted in 1984 by his parents, in 2011, is an economics and education alum of Stonybrook University, USA and the Harvard School of Education. Under his stewardship, this CBSE and IB-affiliated day-cum-boarding school set in an emerald green 40-acre campus in suburban Indore has been top-ranked in the annual EWISR for the past three years consecutively (with 1+ accolade awarded for innovation and capacity expansion). The record of SAIS promoted in 2006 by the late Bijoy Kumar Sahoo (BKS), whose promising career as a national pace-setter of K-12 education was tragically cut short by the Covid-19 virus three years ago, is equally impressive, indicative of the solid foundation on which BKS and his highly-qualified survivor wife Dr. Silpi Sahoo built this new genre no-expense-spared K-12 school. SAIS has been ranked India’s #1 day-cum-boarding school for five years consecutively. Right at the top of the 2024-25 league table of India’s 185 most well-known day-cum-boarding schools, there is little change from last year with the superbly-equipped Greenwood High, Bengaluru, constructed by the renowned Salarpuria Sattva Group which has developed over 50 million sq.ft of avant-garde commercial and residential property in peninsular India, retaining its #2 position (and #1 in South India) for the third year in succession. However the…