Within less than a decade since it was established, MIS has earned an excellent reputation in the textiles city and beyond for providing rigorous academics balanced with co-curricular and sports education to its 539 students including 29 from six foreign countries – Hemalatha Raghupathi Spread over a 17-acre green campus featuring expansive avenues, shady nooks and landscaped gardens in Coimbatore’s fast-growing educational hub of Saravanampatti, the Manchester International School (MIS, estb.2009) has earned an excellent reputation in the textile city and beyond for providing rigorous academics balanced with co-curricular and sports education to its 539 students including 272 girl children and 29 students from six foreign countries. In the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2018-19, MIS is ranked Tamil Nadu’s #2 international day-cum-boarding school, and among India’s Top 10 schools (#5) for STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) education excellence in the EW Grand Jury Awards 2018-19. Promoted in 2009 by businessman P.S. Moorthi and wife Priya with the objective of establishing the first IB (International Baccalaureate) school in Coimbatore (pop. 1.6 million), MIS has evolved into a highly-respected K-12 school affiliated with multiple school-leaving exam boards — International Baccalaureate, Geneva; Cambridge Assessment International Education, UK, and the Delhi-based Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). Currently, it offers the IB Primary Years Programme (PYP: classes I-V) to 218 students mentored by 28 teachers; the Cambridge IGCSE, AS and A levels (classes VI-XII) to 171 pupils tutored by 18 teachers and the CBSE curriculum (kindergarten-class VIII) to 150 children mentored by 16 teachers. MIS also hosts a state-of-the-art preschool M-Kids on its main campus and an M-Kids’ franchise in the Ramnagar suburb for children aged 1.5-6 years which provides a blend of Montessori and IB pedagogies. “The prime objective of MIS is to provide children of this fast growing city access to high-quality syllabuses and curriculums of offshore examination boards and prepare them for admission into the world’s best universities. The IB and Cambridge International affiliations empower us to provide students broad and balanced education rooted in contemporary inquiry-based pedagogies so that they evolve into socially conscious, well-adjusted citizens prepared to take on challenges of the new globalised order. Student diversity is also very important for us and currently we host 23 NRI students from Singapore, Malaysia and the Middle East, and six from France, Germany and China,” says P.S. Moorthi, an alumnus of Bharathiar University, managing director of the city-based Aishwariyaa Handlooms Pvt. Ltd and promoter-chairman of MIS. To realise its institutional goal of providing education with an international perspective and reach, the Manchester International School management has integrated special programmes for language development and STEAM excellence into its curriculums. They include robotics engineering, 3D printing, fashion design and photography. Moreover, MIS has signed up with the Singapore Institute of Management and Rotary Youth Exchange for student exchange programmes. The school’s emphasis on nurturing academic excellence through diverse skills development and exchange programmes is paying dividends. In 2018, six of 12 students who wrote Cambridge International’s A level exam received…
