Global Public School (GPS) Review - Ongoing Update: R2I - Schooling for Kids

Our kids completed seven years at Global Public School (GPS), Chottanikkara (Kerala, India) at the end of March 2017. We considered changing schools after the second year with the idea that the kids will probably be ready to grow out of the NRI oriented Global Public School (GPS). Ultimately decided to stay put as there was no clear winner with respect to choosing a better school - Global Public School (GPS) is by no means perfect, but the alternatives just did not seem to guaranty enough of an edge to warranty another major change for the kids. Last year, we again considered our options as our older one had completed Grade 10. We once more opted to stay put as our overwhelming belief was that schools in general could only provide very limited help in covering the CBSE curriculum.

Below are things that the kids and us like about Global Public School (GPS):

1. The staff in general are fairly accommodative of student and parent requests/needs. The service levels have gone down compared to the time when our kids joined, but they are still satisfactory. 
2. Parent volunteering is thankfully still a foreign concept at Global Public School (GPS). There was a minor scare in this regard at the start of the 2012 school year, but it died down quickly, possibly due to lack of parent response. 
3. Global Public School (GPS) continues to have individual teachers for each subject. The school suffers from substantial turnover and it is not unusual for a Science teacher to end up teaching Hindi in lower grades. Even so, the approach is much better overall compared to having the same teacher for all subjects. 
4. Covering the curriculum in the classroom is still a priority at Global Public School (GPS). With certain subjects, the teachers end-up rushing through chapters in the final months, but it is still better than not covering portions at all.
5. For high school, the expertise of teachers are woefully low. The only viable option is to go with tuition. For that, there are options as retired college professors who have deep knowledge and interest in the subject are available.  The only downside is the multiple chauffeuring that comes with that. 

Below are things we came across over the last seven years that can be considered as downsides with GPS:

1. Quality of teaching at the highschool level is a concern as teachers lack expertise in the subject matter. The vast majority of the students get by with tuition support.  Note: This is not a GPS specific problem as many schools have the issue.
2. Favoritism is a constant issue - kids of highly successful businessmen, well-known politicians, movie/sports personalities, and GPS staff receive favored treatment for competitive school activities including academics. It is not uncommon for a kid to come home and say they were placed first for a certain competition only to be displaced by favored kids for the first three positions when the official results are announced and prizes distributed. The same thing happens with class tests, although the despicable activity is more subtle. Note: This again is not a GPS specific problem. All schools have this issue, although the level of such abuse varies. Money, time, and influence can buy most anything in our society and schools are no exception. One way to look at this is that our kids get exposure to what they will see in real-life and so they will be more equipped to deal with it. 
3. The choice of textbooks are a concern. With CBSE, through Grade 8, the school has a choice of choosing the books to use in the classroom as long as they adhere to CBSE guidelines. For higher grades, there is a defined set from which the school can choose. GPS changes textbook vendors every year for grades below 9. The books used in the 2010 school year were pretty good but for 2011 they switched to using Exceed. There was some marketing hype surrounding that, but the books were horrible - many of the pages were verbatim copies of Wiki pages from the Internet. Thankfully they changed text books for the 2012 school year - while those textbooks were not perfect, they were fairly adequate. The pattern has continued. With each change, the price of the book package for the school year goes up substantially - 30% has been the average per year. It seems the school goes on changing books based on which publisher spins the best story for a particular year. 
4. Door-to-door transportation was advertised as a great convenience when we joined in 2010. The service level has gone down substantially with this. Currently, our kids are picked up in front of our housing-community (a public road) and dropped off there as well. That means, they need an escort back and forth for safety reasons. At the start of the 2012 school year, they had asked us to wait at a junction 500 meters away, which was even worse, but after complaining a few times, they agreed to alter the route a little bit. 
5. Fees have gone up at double the rate of inflation in the last eight years. The pattern is a little disconcerting. Please see below for a comparative spreadsheet of Global Public School (GPS) fees for the eight years covering 2010-11 through 2017-18 school years.
6. Swimming is still part of the curriculum. Breakfast/Lunch is also provided as needed. Service levels for both of these have gone down - the number of swimming classes per year goes down in some years due to various avoidable reasons and the quality of the menu for breakfast and lunch has gone down as well. The children also find it irritating that portions given for students are strictly controlled and any wastage is not tolerated while the chechees ignore all kinds of abuses by teachers (gross food wastage, taking a lot more than their share of pappads, meat, fish, desserts, etc). 
7. The two-hour optional extra-curricular activity is somewhat less useful than it sounds. Our children went for the program only in their first year. The reason had to do with the fact that the sessions are focused on giving an introductory level of training in the activities - so, to get to the next level, outside training is still necessary. 

Below is a look at fee increases at Global Public School (GPS) over the years. For the sample, middle school fees and the lowest transportation fees (up to 15KM) were used. Lower grades have marginally lower fees while higher grades have substantially higher fees:

Notes: Registration, Admission, Caution Deposit, Security Deposit, etc are additional one-time fees when a student is admitted. Please see our previous update with 2010 data for an idea. Also, for Grades 10, 11 and 12, for a day scholar, fees are quite a bit more as day boarding is compulsory for those grades.


Related Posts:

1. Global Public School (GPS) Review - Ongoing Update (this post).
2. Global Public School (GPS) vs Bay Farm Elementary - Comparative Review.

Last Updated: 06/2017.