To impact the importance of ECCE upon the ignorant establishment and the public consciousness, EducationWorld has commissioned six annual surveys to rate, rank and celebrate the best pre-primaries in cities countrywide where there is a modicum of awareness of the vital importance of early childhood, pre-primary education. Moreover at considerable expense and effort, we have organised five annual EducationWorld Early Childhood Education Global Conferences at which internationally acclaimed early childhood educators have acquainted nursery and kindergarten teachers and principals with new developments and research studies in ECCE. The sixth EW Early Childhood Education Global Conference is scheduled to be held in Bangalore’s ITC Gardenia Hotel on January 23, 2016. So if you are interested in the subject, block that date.
This is not to say that we have ignored publicly provided ECCE by the Central and state governments. Way back in 1976, in a moment of rare enlightenment, the Union government (during the Emergency) rolled out its Integrated Child Development Services under which anganwadis were established countrywide to provide nutrition to lactating mothers and newborns, as well as minimal education. Their number has since grown to 1.6 million which cover only half the 158 million children in the 0-5 age group. Your editors have been consistently advocating much greater provision than the pathetic allocations made in Union budgets (Rs.8,355 crore in Union budget 2015-16, i.e, Rs.52,218 per centre).
Our efforts have borne some fruit. Just before it was swept out of office in New Delhi, the scandals-tainted Congress-led UPA-II government approved a draft National Early Childhood Care and Education Policy in November 2013. But the fate of the NECCE Policy is uncertain under its successor BJP-led NDA government at the Centre, for whom development of human capital seems a low priority.
Be that as it may, in this Christmas issue, we present detailed league tables rating and ranking over 400 of the country’s most-admired preschools in ten cities. A total of 6,283 sample respondents comprising parents with children in preschool, principals and teachers were interviewed by field researchers of the well-reputed Delhi-based market research and opinion polls company Centre for Forecasting & Research (C fore), to rate each city’s most well-known preschools across 10 parameters (competence of teachers, parental involvement, safety and hygiene, infrastructure, leadership quality etc). The ratings awarded by the respondents were aggregated to arrive at a total score and ranking for preschools in each city. Moreover, following complaints of apples-and-oranges type of comparisons, this year we have adopted a new taxonomy (classification system) dividing pre-primaries into three categories – owned/proprietary, franchised and pre-primaries of K-10/12 schools – and have ranked them separately inter se.
