India’s top international day-cum-boarding schools

Apart from high-quality globally benchmarked academic education, international day-cum-boarding schools provide day scholars access to excellent co-curricular and sports education infrastructure that residential schools build for boarders. Therefore they are becoming increasingly popular Within the upscale, elite category of international schools affiliated with offshore school-leaving examination boards, day-cum-boarding schools offer students the best of both worlds. Apart from high-quality globally benchmarked academic education, they also provide day scholars access to excellent co-curricular and sports education infrastructure that residential schools build for boarders. Moreover, they tend to offer weekly board and lodging options that permit students to spend weekends with parents and/or relatives. Therefore, international (co-ed) day-cum-boarding schools are becoming increasingly popular with the growing number of households where both parents are gainfully employed. In this category of international schools, the Indus International School, Bengaluru (IIS-B, estb.2003), spread across a 28-acre campus in the IT hub of Whitefield with excellent co-curricular and sports facilities and IB (Geneva) affiliation, has seemingly attained the perfect mix. It not only hosts students from over 30 countries around the world but also weekly boarders from the hi-tech city of Bengaluru (aka Bangalore) in which households with both parents working full-time is normative. Therefore for almost a decade, this K-12 fully IB school with 1,200 students, 145 teachers and a teacher training academy on its campus, has been topping the international day-cum-boarding league table with monotonous regularity. This year as well for the ninth consecutive year, sample respondents comprising 11,368 parents, educationists, principals and teachers have voted IIS-B India’s #1 international day-cum-boarding school with top scores under the parameters of curriculum and pedagogy (including digital readiness), teacher welfare and development, leadership/management quality and community service across all categories of international schools. It’s also pertinent to note that the domination of this league table is not limited to IIS-B. Two affiliated Indus International Schools in Pune and Hyderabad promoted by the Bengaluru-based Indus Trust (estb.2001) are also ranked among the Top 10. IIS-Hyderabad is ranked #6 (cf. #9 in 2019-20) while IIS-Pune has retained its #8 rank of last year. “We are always thrilled when IIS-B is ranked India’s #1 international day-cum-boarding school. It’s public acknowledgement of the continuous efforts of our management and faculty to innovate and improve across all parameters of school education excellence. This year, I am especially delighted that we are ranked #1 on the newly introduced parameter of curriculum and pedagogy (digital readiness) as the school’s management, teachers, and students with the full cooperation of our parents, pulled out all stops to ensure children’s learning continued online during these challenging pandemic times, which forced closure of all education institutions countrywide. We designed new curriculums and digital pedagogies to meet this unprecedented challenge and are pleased to report that our students have developed advanced collaboration, creativity, adaptability, climate literacy and situational awareness skills,” says Sarojini Rao, an economics and education alumna of Pune and Annamalai universities and principal of IIS-B since 2005. However, it’s commonly acknowledged that the major reason why Indus International…