I started this school because I had a list

I taught physics in government schools for fifteen years before I started this one. I mention that not as a credential but as an explanation — almost everything Siksha does differently comes from something I watched go wrong in those years.

I watched bright children get written off at eleven because nobody had time to find out why they had stopped answering. I watched teachers who wanted to do better be given fifty-eight children and told to manage. I watched parents get handed a mark sheet and no explanation of what it meant.

So when we opened in 1998 with forty-two children in a rented building in Kondapur, we made three decisions that we have not changed since. Classes stay small enough that a teacher can know every child. Teachers are given time in the working day to plan properly, not asked to do it at midnight. And nothing about a child's progress is hidden from their parents, including the parts that are uncomfortable.

We are now four campuses and four thousand two hundred children. The temptation at this size is to become a system. I would ask any parent reading this to hold us to the opposite. If your child becomes a roll number here, we have failed at the only thing we set out to do.

Come and see us on an ordinary Tuesday. Not an open day — a Tuesday. That is when you will find out whether any of this is true.