Affiliated with the UK-based CIE board, the K-12 Ardee World School, Gurgaon is the first school in Delhi NCR to offer Montessori education upto class VIII: Autar Nehru

Spread across two acres within Ardee City, a 200-acre residential township built by the Ardee Group in Gurgaon’s Sector 52, Ardee World School (AWS) is the first K-12 school in Delhi NCR (national capital region) to offer Montessori education up to class VIII.

Promoted in 2008, AWS has adopted, integrated and extended the Montessori pedagogy of its pre-primary Ardee School, Golf Links (estb.2003 and ranked among Delhi’s Top 5 preschools in the EW Preschool Rankings 2015) to primary education. In 2015, it inaugurated a senior wing (class IX-XII) of the school in the neighbouring Sector 57. Affiliated with the UK-based Cambridge International Examinations (CIE) board, the co-ed day school has 250 children mentored by 30 teachers on its muster rolls.

Since the promotion of its Delhi preschool in 2003 followed by AWS in 2008, the Ardee Group, a real estate major credited with construction of the iconic Gopal Das Bhawan in Delhi’s Connaught Place among other properties, has established a Montessori-inspired K-12 school in North Goa (2009) and another pre-primary in Noida (2014). The group’s entry into education was prompted by chairperson Shefali Varma’s dissatisfaction with the poor quality of early childhood education and discovery of the Montessori system through Chanda Raisinghani, a Montessori missionary.

“I was a Montessori trainer at Delhi’s Magic Years preschool when I met Shefali. Both of us were convinced that Delhi needed a full-fledged Montessori preschool offering high-quality early childhood care and education. As the Ardee School gained reputation, we were flooded with demands from parents to start a primary-secondary incorporating the Montessori system of education. As land is scarce in Delhi, we decided to site the Ardee World School within Ardee City in Gurgaon with a commitment to integrate Montessori teaching until class VIII,” recalls Raisinghani, an alumna of Miranda House, Delhi and the London Montessori Centre, UK and trustee and founder-president (education and training) of the Ardee Foundation.

According to Raisinghani, an integrated programme which extends Montessori theory and practice into primary education is the distinctive feature of AWS. “We are the only school in North India to offer the Montessori curriculum up to class VIII. That’s because we believe this system is best suited to develop the experiential learning and life skills of primary students. Given hands-on, skills-oriented early childhood and primary schooling for ten years or more, children develop sufficient confidence to learn independently and work collaboratively. In our primary school, students use Montessori learning materials such as grammar boxes, multiplication strip boards, stamp games and map puzzles to learn numeracy, art and design, and sciences. All our teachers are trained in the Montessori method and help students develop independent learning skills which prepare them for the inquiry-based CIE curriculum of secondary and higher secondary school,” she says.

To this end, the two-acre AWS primary school campus has been designed to facilitate Montessori teaching-learning. The school’s 14 spacious air conditioned classrooms are fully equipped with Montessori materials for learning languages, science, history, geography, and art, while a Montessori Lab offers prescribed materials for hands-on learning and a well-stocked library houses 3,000-plus volumes. In addition, an outdoor botany lab, music and art/design rooms, and audio-visual lab encourage students to enhance their artistic intelligences. Sports facilities include a basketball court, skating rink, swimming pool, yoga room and a playground for soccer, cricket, tennis and athletics. The recently inaugurated senior school campus offers state-of-the-art academic buildings and labs, and upon completion will feature an athletics track, basketball, squash and tennis courts, a swimming pool and gymnasium, art gallery, sculpture zones, amphitheatre, and sound studios.

“Our focus is on well-rounded education with children encouraged to develop their sports and artistic intelligences and also grasp ecology and sustainability issues. As in the classroom, through arts pavilions and outdoor education we help children develop independence, team work and appreciation of nature. Experiential and learning-by-doing which is the essence of Montessori, defines our academic and co-curricular education philosophy,” says Sushma Raturi, an alumna of Isabella Thoburn College, Lucknow, who worked with Assam Valley School, the British School, Delhi, Mussoorie International School and The Shri Ram schools before being appointed principal of AWS in February.

With the school ready to admit its first batch of secondary students this June, the management is clearly focused on post-primary education. “AWS’ primary section is highly regarded by parents who appreciate our efforts to develop students into life-long self-learners. Our focus now is on shaping the senior school by carefully blending our provenly successful Montessori culture with CIE’s contemporary enquiry-based learning curriculum in our Gurgaon and Goa schools. Our objective is to develop boutique K-12 schools focused on delivering high-quality education in aesthetically designed learning environments to manageable numbers of students,” says Raisinghani.