Page 54 - EW December 2025

Cover Story EW INDIA PRESCHOOL RANKINGS 2025-26

policy formulators, even if belatedly. attention to students, value for money,
The National Education Policy (NEP) leadership, parental involvement and
2020 mandates three years of compul- special needs education. The scores
sory ECCE for all children in the 3-6 awarded to preschools by the sample
age bracket countrywide. To this end, respondents under every parameter
the decades-old 10+2 school system were totaled to rank preschools in
has been replaced by a new 5+3+3+4 35 cities. I believe EWIPR offers par-
school continuum, mandating three ents comprehensive league tables of
years of compulsory pre-primary edu- the best preschools in the selected
cation for all children. 35 cities,” says Shubra Mishra, an
Subsequently in October 2022, the alumna of IIM-Lucknow with wide ex-
Union education ministry released perience of market research (MARG,
the first-ever National Curriculum MARG-ORG) who promoted AZ Re-
Framework for Foundational Stage search Partners in 2002. Over the past
(NCF-FS) 2022 prescribing well- two decades, AZ Research has estab-
researched, age-appropriate curricu- lished an excellent reputation for rig-
lums, pedagogies and best practices to Mishra: robust survey methodology orous market research. Among AZR’s
ready the country’s youngest children corporate clients: Mars Global, Wipro
for formal primary education. The sample respondents comprising 2,450 FMCG, IndusInd Bank, Abbott Phar-
360-page NCF-FS unambiguously parents with at least one child in pre- maceuticals, Polycab and Nova IVF.
mandates that infants learn through school, and 850 pre-primary teachers In the following pages, we present
play and activities and stresses the and educators in 35 cities. Under a parameter scores and league tables
importance of professionally delivered robust multi-modular methodology, ranking India’s best proprietary and
ECCE in the country’s 1.39 million we conducted one-on-one interviews franchised preschools in 19 cities
AWCs and 60,000 private preschools. personally, telephonically and/or by countrywide (and an addendum of 57
Meanwhile, to ensure that teach- email. Every respondent was request- other cities). Also by popular demand,
ing-learning standards in functional ed to rate preschools they were aware we present a separate and distinc-
pre-primary schools improve continu- of — preschools unknown to at least tive league table ranking India’s Top
ously, the focus of the annual EWIPR 20 respondents were eliminated from 10 Preschools that have set national
has shifted to proclaiming the coun- the rankings — on ten parameters of benchmarks in delivering contempo-
try’s best pre-primaries to highlight- early childhood education excellence rary, globally accepted early childhood
ing them as models worthy of emula- as ideated and evolved by Education- care and education (see p. 56).
tion and replication. World over the past 15 years. The
To compile the EW India Preschool parameters are: teacher competence,
Rankings 2025-26, we commissioned infrastructure, curriculum and peda- With Paromita Sengupta, Reshma
the Bengaluru-based AZ Research gogy, safety and hygiene, individual Ravishanker, & Baishali Mukherjee
Partners Pvt. Ltd — which also con-
ducted the record-breaking EW India
School Rankings 2025-26 survey pub- EWIPR 2025-26 COUNTRYWIDE SURVEY
lished in September and October — to
conduct field surveys in 19 major cities
viz, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata,
Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Navi
Mumbai, Thane, Ahmedabad, Indore,
Vadodara, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Guru-
gram, Noida, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar,
and Ghaziabad, and 16 tier-II/III cit-
ies (where there is sufficient aware-
ness of the importance of pre-primary
education) to rate and rank India’s Metro cities
most respected pre-primaries. Tier l, ll, lll & lV cities
“With awareness of the role and (76 cities)
value of professionally delivered ECCE
spreading to smaller towns and cities,
this year we carefully selected 3,300

54 EDUCATIONWORLD DECEMBER 2025