Preschool / day care hunting in Sarjapura, Bangalore

Zeroing in on the right daycare/ preschool for my child turned out to be a tougher proposition than expected. There were at least five that looked as “international” as the new buzz word would allow! On closer scrutiny, the only commonality seemed to be the scent of money via the “international preschool” route.

Get past the hoardings, the hype, the badly acquired accents and the constant badgering marketers, and you find a school structure put together in no time, staff piled on without checking credentials, helpers who are barely trained and hapless children slipping into a state of psychological orphancy. Unwanted at home by working parents and treated as a tiresome package of needs at daycare, many toddlers seem to be getting alienated from the feeling of security that a “family” offers.

The reasons working parents like me turn to daycare could be many, from absence of elders at home or simply to provide a lively activity group for a toddler to spend time at.

I have personally done a sting operation at several daycare/ preschools to check how the staff handles kids. This was two years ago, so the situation may have changed.  Shemrock, Kara, Little Elly, Eurokids and India International were the closest. This is what I found at all the centres.

a)      Trained staff/ helpers/ ayahs as we call them were in short supply. As a result most daycares recruited people ill-suited to handling children appropriately. When I say appropriately, I mean with consciousness of hygiene, basic child psychology, love and the wisdom of a mother. I have witnessed helpers using unsuitable language, threatening sobbing children to “finish meals or mummy won’t come to pick you up”, even pinching some children under the table. I have also seen helpers holding children’s hands and doing activities like colouring themselves while the child is busy with other things.

b)      Spaces are too small and cramped for large numbers of children.

c)       Curriculum/ activities are either not planned in advance or not adhered to. Nobody seems accountable for this, including the teacher.

d)      Communication is weak between daycare and parents. Sadly, very often, parents are working and unable to find time to check on the progress and well-being of their children at daycare. They therefore find communication a waste of time and feel confident the child will get by somehow.

e)      The owner of the daycare is very infrequent with supervision of the centre.

This last, would really help.

My child went to Kara, purely because it was part of an international body, claimed to follow the same standards and I loved the helpers from the start. The problems seemed tiny at first, but were indicative of a pattern – a pattern of apathy for the same sensitivity to standards that Kara seemed to advertise in the first place.

The helpers, I must admit, were the best I have seen in any other daycare. My child still remembers them fondly, god bless them!

Coming back to the problems – Kara overshot the batch size and things seemed set to continue that way till a few of us got together and asked for more staff. We even asked for one teacher to be changed for her rude conduct, nasty comments to children’s innocent questions and her habit of ridiculing the shy, quiet ones.

Kara’s snack time was an unhygienic affair with children being offered scoops of the snack in the palms of their hands from one bowl. Curriculum was never handed out to the parents, and the owner – a British lady Katherine – never replied to emails, although on paper, we were always encouraged to write. Weekly activities were supposed to be put up in a timetable for all parents to see, but was NEVER done for the entire year. Helpers were doing children’s activities, which showed too, with the poor English sentences describing the work. For most part of the year, children slept on rubber mats without covers, in spite of repeated requests. Thankfully, I picked up my child before nap time. In spite of charging for evening – the normal day ends at 3.30 pm – Kara did not conduct any activities in the evening for toddlers; after the teachers left, the children were left pretty much to themselves, sitting around, waiting for parents to come pick them up. The school administrator is an angel by the name Meenuji. But there is only so much she can do, without help from the lady running the school.

I wonder sometimes if the poor standards maintained, in spite of the ‘international’ label in most daycares has something to do with the Indian psyche.

Everything in India is chalta hai. We are so bad at implementing quality standards ourselves, we don’t ask for it outside our homes either. People get away with anything – from holding huge rallies, driving recklessly, disregarding traffic rules, littering streets, charging bribes, paying bribes, to stuffing 25 children in a room fit to hold 12.

Maybe we need more Montessori schools. But then again, how many of us know that genuine Montessori accredited preschools in Bangalore are, but a few?

What are our choices? Are we guilty of promoting an acceptance of Indianised international standards only because we are “busy”, double-income, working families? Can we call ourselves a family at all?

Over time, I have learnt that the best meter to gauge a child’s comfort level at school is his eagerness to go at all. Today, my child is no longer at Kara (thank God) and looks forward to go to preschool. The simplest question to ask is, “Honey, do you want to go to school?” When your child answers, think about it.