In January 2017, the parent community at the Indus Early Learning Centre in Hebbal, Bengaluru, found itself in an unexpected situation. Each parent received an email from the senior management at the Indus International School saying that the centre was shutting down.

Indus is an International Baccalaureate (IB) school located on Sarjapur Road in Bengaluru, with children studying from Class I all the way up to Class XII. For preschoolers, it has early learning centres all over the city, which are given autonomy to function, unlike a typical franchise model.

The centre in Hebbal was, according to the school’s senior management, proving to be too expensive to maintain, with only 35 children enrolled there. In a city where most preschools are competing aggressively to market their services and attract more parents, the Indus centre in Hebbal had remained pretty low-key, so much so that many school-hunting parents in that area had not even heard about it.

The email was a blow to the parents mainly because of how much they loved the school. A preschool that pluralizes education, the Indus Early Learning Centre was a second home to children from other countries too, including England, Japan, Korea and Sri Lanka. One of the parents, who is from Spain, says thata when she received the email about the school closing down, she contemplated returning to her country.

These, however, were the least of the problems that the school was facing. The management told the parents that even if they had more enrolments, they would have to shut the centre down in May. They were incurring losses, which they told the parents was how much money they spent on their main campus in Sarjapur.

“Our first reaction was shock," says Bulbul Satsangi, a parent whose child goes to Indus. “Our children love the school and we could not imagine sending them to another school. Given the amount of personal attention and care that children get in this environment, we were unsure about them receiving it in any other school in our area, international or otherwise."

The parent community at Indus was largely divided about how to respond to the email. “Most of the parents were upset," says Kamakshi Raghavan, a parent who loved the school’s holistic approach to education.

The parents formed a WhatsApp group and their first reaction was to send a strongly worded email to the management, even talking about legal consequences. A few of them even wanted their admission fees back and some had checked other schools in the vicinity to see if they could move their children there.

If there was one thing that everyone agreed upon, it was that they all loved the school and wanted it to continue. “It was then that a couple of us thought about the possibility of forming a parent community to help manage the school," adds Raghavan.

Next big step

Most parents were sceptical about the workability of the plan and proposed a meeting with the top management to get them to rethink their decision. The management was pleased that the parents wanted the school to continue but were not willing to rethink shutting the centre down.

“They even told us that a couple of schools in the area were thinking of purchasing and taking over our centre but this did not reassure us at all," says Raghavan.

After a lot of pressure from the parent community, the management agreed to the meeting and what transpired is a story to be retold many times by all the people involved.

It is a difficult ask to wrangle a common agenda out of a group with such varying opinions, but Raghavan was one of the few who believed that a parent-backed learning community would work. After the management had explained its stance, the parents decided to take some time out before giving their decision.

“We told the school that we did not want it to shut," says Raghvan. “Arjun Ray, the CEO of Indus, then asked us how we planned to go about it and we gave a short presentation on our plans."

Indus’s management told the parents that they were open to running the centre with them. They agreed to keep it open without any caveats and also shared with the parents all their constraints and ambitions and how they would all step up to the challenge. The problems were many but the management asked the parents to think of ways to cut down costs and drive marketing activity.

“The aim was to make the school sustainable in every sense," says Raghavan, who took over the cost benefit analysis, while Sophie Rogers, who had moved to Bengaluru from England, took over marketing and efforts to drive the school’s visibility in and around that area.

The parents also started to publish their positive views about the school on Google reviews and Facebook, any way that they thought could boost visibility. They needed to let Indus know that they were serious about helping the school continue its operations.

On digging into the finances, an area of concern that came up was the rent—fortunately, the landlord, being an academician himself, offered to renegotiate.

Plan of action

A week after the initial meeting, the parent community presented its plan. They had a more focused marketing campaign in place, right from programmes to getting posters out in apartments and neighbourhoods. One of the parents even offered to develop a free safety mobile app for the parents to know what was happening in school.

The senior management was so impressed by the parents’ progress that when the topic of elementary school came up, they even agreed to provide high-speed buses for the children to travel the long distance to the main campus in Sarajpur Road, which is about 43.1km from the preschool.

This was when one parent from the Indus preschool mentioned that he had land close to the preschool and the institution could think of starting a high school right there in that area.

“The management asked us to send a proposal," says Satsangi. “They were open to collaboration in every sense. We were stunned. This meant that not only is the preschool continuing but it will be extended to standard one from the next academic year and a proposal to increase one grade every year is being considered. This means that after the children finish preschool, they won’t graduate but continue in the same school in the higher grades."

What motivated the Indus parent community to save their school? Schools shut down every day and parents always find other schools.

According to Satsangi, it is the strong parent and teacher community at the Hebbal centre that really made it special. “We operate like a family. The teachers treat our children as their own and Indus is more like an alternative school where the children are given the chance to truly learn and grow.

“From music and art to languages and books, the activities and learning outcomes at the centre are innovative and immense. The teachers are wonderful and one teacher even brings her own new born baby who is part of the school.

“It has a truly nurturing environment. The parents volunteer at the school and form an important part of the community. We also have parents from all over the world, and this multi-ethnic background really makes us great as a group and makes our children understand the world."

Dawn of the parent-led school community

It is difficult to understand the tenacity of the parents at Indus unless one has fought a losing battle against quality of education in India. For some parents in Whitefield, the rising cost in education was one of the pain points that they were keen to address when they started Citizens Gurukul, the first parent-run, zero-profit and zero-loss school in the city.

With schools in the city hiking fees by 15% to 20% every year, even the base price of LKG (lower kindergarten) or UKG (upper kindergarten) can be out of reach for most common citizens.

The rising prices and the lack of transparency in school administration prompted a group of 14 to set up the Citizens Gurukul trust, consisting of parents who wanted democracy in learning.

To get more parents involved, the group went to many apartment communities in Whitefield to talk to people about the idea. Jai Prakash Nethala, one of the 14 trustees of the group, says, “For the amount we spend, the education that our children receive is not good at all. There aren’t good teachers, the curriculum is rote-based and doesn’t address the idea that every child is a different learner."

The parents in Bengaluru were keen to have a more transparent education system. It was a new school model but the momentum behind Citizens Gurukul was powerful right from the start, with parents, local groups in Whitefield, educators, journalists and donors rallying to support the cause.

The preschool has finalized a location in Prashant Layout near Hope Farm Signal in Whitefield and will start operations from the end of June. The school has found many backers, and admissions are almost full for its first academic year.

The entire school management consists of parents whose children are enrolled in the school. “The trust will not interfere in the working of the school and will not make any profit but will ensure that we maintain the core philosophy of the group. The parents are beneficiary trustees. They take important decisions and we have educators on our advisory board to guide them. It is collaborative and we discuss everything with parents before inducting them into our group," says Nethala.

According to this report, private schools in Bengaluru are hiking fee by 10% to 22% every year. “We won’t be under pressure to make profit." Nethala, on the other hand, states that the school fees at Citizens Gurukul will be 25% less than in most mainstream private schools in Bengaluru.

The idea of parents playing a vital role in the school system is part of the ethos that drives many to an alternative schooling model. A Waldorf teacher in Bengaluru, for instance, mentions that when they started their school years ago in a small house, they owed their existence to parents who were bold and far-sighted enough to become important backers in such a different model of education. These were parents who valued a school for something more than just exorbitant facilities.

In fact, Centre for Learning, one of Bengaluru’s better-known alternative schools, was started as a different school as early as 1990, with its teachers being some of its first parents. What makes CFL remarkable is that it is completely run by teachers, without headmasters or any form of hierarchy. Parents form an important part of the learning process in the school.

Nagini Prasad, a teacher at CFL, says, “On the last Sunday of every month, we invite parents to spend half the day with us to discuss a theme for the month. This could be a theme related to life, education, diversity, media, need for entertainment, well-being, fears and more. Parents sometimes introduce the theme along with a teacher and we all discuss it. This dialogue is important as the parents and teachers are bringing up the children together."

CFL is a non-profit school model and, when necessary, parents even help with the fund raising, work in the community kitchen and visit as resource people to talk about their area of expertise and add value to the classroom.

In CFL’s “flat" structure, every member of the staff has an equal say and a role to play, whether he or she has been there for two years or 20. Prasad, says, “Within the teacher body, there are committees and areas of competence, so smaller groups of teachers will have a deeper knowledge of certain areas or spearhead certain areas of operation. However, all decisions are taken by the teacher group as a whole. This requires a stamina for dialogue, questioning each other’s assumptions and ideologies and an ability to listen openly and take feedback, something that we are all continually working at.

“Given this, accountability and responsibility is taken collectively by the whole teacher body. This goes for all decisions whether it be where to put a piece of installation art, to financial planning for the next five years. Similarly, salaries are not dependent on length of employment at CFL. Remuneration is no different whether a teacher has just joined or was a founder."

Will education systems of the future be more inclusive? “In schools of the past, such parental support was really a rarity and this collaborative model of running schools is worth emulating," says Indus CEO Ray.

Shweta Sharan writes on education for Buzzing Bubs. In 2012, she started a Facebook community called Bangalore Schools, which has now grown to include more parents, teachers, education reporters, journalists, educationists and policymakers in the city.

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