Proposal for a student exchange plan between DPS schools, alternative disciplinary methods are among innovations
New Delhi: Among schools from across the country, one name comes up over and over as a trusted brand — Delhi Public School, or DPS.
It has been around long enough to compete with convent schools, yet is continuously reinvented in large cities and small towns year after year as new franchises open to surging demand from parents for quality private schools.
Varied inputs: (top) Maqsood Ali Khan, who runs three DPS schools in Bangalore, sitting with students in a classroom. He says he is against the DPS Society’s attempt to send principals of old schools to new ones because he wants his own teachers to get promotions. Hemant Mishra / Mint. (above) Meenakshi Singh, owner of DPS Sushant Lok in Haryana, says both entrepreneur franchisees and the school chain have gained from the association. Harikrishna Katragadda / Mint
The school chain now has 115 schools in India and 13 abroad — a reflection of communities from smaller towns to Dhaka, Bangladesh, seeing the arrival of a DPS as a sign of progress.
From its first school at New Delhi’s Mathura Road in 1949, DPS gradually introduced the franchise system of education. First public sector companies and later on entrepreneurs were encouraged to open independent schools.
The franchisees pay the Delhi Public School Society — comprising retired bureaucrats, judges, ex-army men and former school principals — a royalty for the use of the DPS brand name and logo. In return, the society nominates half the managing board of each school, besides offering academic support in the form of experienced principals to new schools.
In education circles, the franchise system is viewed with suspicion, but some experts are appreciative of what the DPS brand has achieved.
“In franchise schools, there is sometimes a problem of quality — how much are you able to maintain it across schools? But the DPS system has been able to provide relatively affordable schools to a large number of people,” said Sridhar Rajagopalan, an Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, alumnus who heads Educational Initiatives Pvt. Ltd, a company which tests students on their understanding of concepts as against rote learning.
Though his company does not share data of specific schools, it did say that DPS schools did better than average in the tests. Rajagopalan’s colleague, Sudhir Ghodke, who visits the schools to market the tests, said the brand exercises quality control in different ways.
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“The DPS group moves senior principals…to new schools to provide leadership support to the new school and, backed with a centralized teachers’ training component, they do work towards ensuring a basic standard across the new and established schools,” Ghodke said.
Thanks to livemint.com
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well reinvention is very important. I am sure this will interest lot of folks.
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