Introduced in 2010, EWIPR has become an annual fixture on the national education calendar with the number of cities covered by the survey increasing from six to 17 this year. Moreover EW’s consistent advocacy of professionally administered early childhood care and education has influenced NEP 2020, writes Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen The privilege of infants of a thin upper crust urban minority for over six decades after independence, universal professionally provided early childhood care and education (ECCE) holds a special place in the hearts and minds of the editors of EducationWorld. Inspired by Los Angeles-based philanthropist Lowell Milken, also promoter-director of Knowledge Universe Llc which in the early decades of the 21st century owned Kinder Care — America’s largest chain of private pre-primary schools (over 2,000) — in 2010 we convened India’s first international ECCE conference in Mumbai at which pre-primary education experts from around the world alerted educationists, parents and educators about the critical importance of professionally administered ECCE. Simultaneously in 2010, we introduced the pioneer EducationWorld India Preschool Rankings in which we ranked the Top 10 pre-primaries in India’s six largest cities. Since then, the EducationWorld India Preschool Rankings (EWIPR) have become an annual fixture on the national education calendar, published without interruption for the past 13 years, while the number of cities covered by the survey has increased to 17 countrywide. Evidently, EW’s persistent advocacy of universalisation of ECCE has impacted government and the academy, if not parents communities, to the vital importance of professionally provided ECCE. The new National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has completely reconfigured the centuries-old 10+2 primary-secondary school system into a new 5+3+3+4 system to tag on three years of compulsory ECCE for every child countrywide, merging three years of pre-primary learning with primary education, aka foundational education. Read together with the landmark Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 which mandates free and compulsory education for all children in classes I-VIII (ages 6-14), after NEP 2020, unanimously approved by the Union Cabinet on July 29, 2020, free education is now compulsory for all children from ages 3-14 countrywide. “Over 85 percent of a child’s cumulative brain development occurs prior to the age of six, indicating the critical importance of appropriate care and stimulation of the brain in the early years in order to ensure healthy brain development and growth. Presently, quality ECCE is not available to crores of young children, particularly children from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Strong investment in ECCE has the potential to give all young children such access, enabling them to participate and flourish in the educational system throughout their lives. Universal provisioning of quality early childhood development, care, and education must thus be achieved as soon as possible, and no later than 2030, to ensure that all students entering grade 1 are school ready,” says NEP 2020, echoing advocacy consistently advanced by EducationWorld. To maintain EducationWorld’s established tradition of rating the country’s best preschools for the benefit of parents with young children — and…
