KV-IIT is best government school, says all-India survey

COIMBATORE: Government schools are usually in the news for all the wrong reasons but a recent survey has ranked Chennai’s Kendriya Vidyalaya-IIT Madras campus at the top. Ten other schools from Tamil Nadu found a place among the top 10 in various categories.
Seven of the top 10 government day schools are Kendriya Vidyalayas with the one on the IIT-Madras campus at the top.The school scored 981 points out of 1,500 in the survey, leading Kendriya Vidyalaya, NMR, JNU Campus, Delhi, by four points. Rajkiya Pratibha Vikas Vidyalaya, Dwarka, Delhi, is at the third place with 951 points and its branch in Shalimar Bagh in the city is at sixth place with 925 points. Two schools from Kerala and one each from Kolkata, Kanpur, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Mumbai are the others topping the list.
In the survey carried out in Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Mumbai, Kanpur, Bhopal, Kolkata and Kochi, more than 1,000 fee-paying and non-fee paying parents from various socio-economic categories, teachers, principals, educationists and academicians were interviewed by field researchers of C-Fore, a marketing company in Delhi. The survey was conducted between May and July, and the results were declared in September.
The interviewees were asked to rate schools on a 10-point scale based on 14 parameters like teacher welfare and development, competence of faculty, sports education, special needs education, co-curricular education, infrastructure provision, academic reputation, value for money, individual attention to students, leadership/management quality, parental involvement, internationalism, community service, and life skills education and conflict management. The interviewers gave competence of faculty double weightage. The scores were totalled and rounded-off to compute the ranking of the schools.
“The objective is to track the country’s best schools as role models for the entire community of educators, and inspire top-ranked institutes to improve from good to great,” said Dilip Thakore, founder of Education World, which conducted the survey.