Reducing my rating from 4 to 2 as the school has become dishonest and trying to market like every other school.
The school infrastructure and curriculum are great and you might have seen several good reviews.
My daughter is doing 2nd std in the ICSE syllabus and I was happy for a year but now the school is forcing kids with too much work, doing more marketing and selective feedback which makes them like regular school which doesn’t care much about stuff other than education. The amount of homework and assessments given are too high especially for kids of 2nd std, my daughter sometimes cries that her hands are paining, school is treating small kids like big kids. The school has been enforcing disciple but I don’t see discipline and being genuine from the recent interactions with the school on surveys from parents, comments on the Facebook page, and direct interactions with the management.
But here is why am rating at 2:
1.The fee hike is too much. Every year they are trying to hike from 10% to 20% and here is a fight from the parents to reduce it. IGCSE fees start from 2.3 Lakhs(excluding) and ICSE fees start from 1.6 Lakhs excluding transport from 1st std and keeping increasing a lot. By the time my son goes to 10th std, I guess I will be paying around 10L including everything.
2.The transport team does not respond properly. Even if some new routes are proposed that could save a lot of time for parents and at the same time covering the same distance so there are no additional fuel charges for the bus, they are not in listening mode. They fix the route as per their plan and parents have to make kids ready by 7 am which could have been 7.45 if proposed new routes are taken into consideration.
3.For sports and extracurricular activities the time given for kids is very less. example with 45 minutes for swimming the kids have to change dress, take a shower, do the swimming along with 30 other kids occupying, and also change back to uniform, all within 45 minutes. So the actual time to swim is barely 15 minutes which is worthless. Same for most sports activities. There should be more time given for sports too.
4.There is a Facebook page that they maintain for ICSE and CBSE, where they post all achievements from school. But apart from that recently they are posting videos of parents who are requesting online classes during the COVID situation. While online classes may be good but the comments on this page by various parents are hidden and only comments that agree to the video are displayed and other comments are filtered and hidden by the school. I lost hope and find VVP being dishonest and not genuine in listening to what parents have to say.
5.And now the online classes havoc. They consider all kids as same in terms of learning capability. Online class duration is the same or almost similar for all classes between 1st and 5th. How can 2nd std kids sit in front of a pc like a 5th st kid without parents intervention? Also in the 40 minutes sessions for 30 students, there is 0 personal attention as it is not possible online which is understandable. And school is not ready to send or upload a recorded session of the live classes. How can a school expect online classes can go well. The recorded videos on their Facebook page itself are pathetic, the voice of the teacher is not clear. What if there is a disconnection of the internet at the teacher’s end or student end, small kids find such situations very difficult. Schools should reduce the time for online classes and should also provide a recorded session of the same, so it can be played again.