There is a school in the Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh where children learn at their own pace. No child is left behind because they moved too slowly. The campus itself — a 360-acre bird sanctuary — is part of the curriculum. There is another in Helsinki where formal schooling does not begin until age seven. Homework is measured in minutes rather than hours. Students there consistently rank among the highest performers in the world. Closer to home, there are government schools in Delhi where every morning begins not with a test, but with a question. That question is simple and radical in equal measure: what does it mean to be happy? Schools getting education right do exist.
They are not all elite private institutions with gleaming infrastructure and international accreditation. Some are government schools. Some are rural outreach programmes. And, some operate within mainstream boards while quietly reimagining what happens inside the classroom. What unites them is a conviction that education is not simply the transmission of information. At its core, it is the formation of a human being. That conviction, research is increasingly confirming, produces children who perform better, feel better, and grow into more capable adults.
This article is for parents who sense something is missing from their child’s current schooling. It explores what schools getting education right could offer instead — and what parents can do with that knowledge.
Why the Current Model Falls Short
The Factory Floor Problem
To understand what schools getting education right are doing differently, it helps to understand what most schools are still doing wrong. The modern school system was not designed around children. It was designed around the industry. The graded classroom, the standardised curriculum, the bell that ends one subject and begins another — these structures all emerged in the nineteenth century. Their purpose was industrial, not educational.
The American school system was built in the industrial age for industrial-age goals: to standardise instruction and efficiently batch-process students, like items on a factory assembly line. That model served a particular historical moment. Today, that model serves neither children nor the society they are entering. The world now demands creativity, emotional resilience, collaborative thinking, and adaptability — none of which a factory-floor classroom was designed to produce.
The evidence of strain is everywhere. Academic pressure begins younger and younger. Mental health difficulties among school-age children are rising sharply. A 2025 Lancet study found that 15 to 20 per cent of Indian adolescents experience anxiety or depression, exacerbated by rote learning, peer competition, and screen fatigue. In India’s intensely competitive education environment, students spend years preparing for examinations that measure a narrow band of ability — and often feel like failures despite working harder than any generation before them.
The question parents are increasingly asking is not whether the current model is broken. It is: what does better look like, and where does it already exist?
What Schools Getting Education Right Have in Common
Before examining specific examples, it is worth identifying the threads that connect every school to getting education right. These run across geography, board affiliation, and pedagogical tradition alike. They are not cosmetic differences — different uniforms, newer buildings, or shinier technology. They are structural and philosophical shifts in how children are seen and taught.
Children Are Seen as Whole Human Beings
Every effective progressive school operates from the same foundational premise — whether it is a Montessori classroom in Bengaluru or a state school in Helsinki. A child is not a vessel to be filled with information. Children are developing people with emotional needs, natural curiosity, a social life, and bodies that need movement, rest, and play. Educational decisions flow from this premise rather than from examination schedules or league table rankings.
Wellbeing Is Not Separate From Learning
Research confirms that schools which prioritise learner wellbeing have the potential to be more effective, with better learning outcomes and greater achievements in learners’ lives. This is not a soft or sentimental claim. It is a neuroscientific one. A child who feels safe, connected, and emotionally regulated operates in the optimal brain state for learning. Chronic stress, by contrast, activates the threat-response system. It actively impairs concentration, memory, reasoning, and creativity — the very functions academic work demands.
Teachers Are Trusted Professionals
In every school, to ensure education is right, teachers receive significant professional autonomy. They know their students as individuals. Their teaching adapts to what they observe in the classroom. Crucially, they are not primarily assessed on whether their students pass standardised tests. This trust in teachers produces a virtuous cycle. Respected professionals attract talented people to the profession. Those talented teachers build meaningful relationships with students, and those relationships are themselves a primary driver of learning.
Assessment Serves the Child
Schools getting education right assess children to understand where they are and what they need — not to rank, grade, or filter them. Assessment is formative rather than purely summative. In many of the schools explored in this article, traditional examinations are entirely absent in the early years. Observation, portfolio work, and qualitative feedback replace them — giving children a richer understanding of their own growth.
Also Read: Movement as Medicine: Why PE Class Is Not a Waste of Time
Finland: The World’s Quietly Revolutionary Classroom
No discussion of schools getting education right is complete without Finland. Since the country first topped the PISA rankings in 2000, educators and policymakers worldwide have made pilgrimages to Finnish schools. What they actually do consistently surprises visitors expecting high-tech classrooms or intensive academic drilling.
Finnish students spend fewer hours in school, have minimal homework, and take virtually no standardised tests until age 16, yet consistently perform among the top nations in reading, mathematics, and science. Children do not begin formal schooling until age seven. Before that, they play. After school, they rest, pursue hobbies, and spend time with their families. Finnish students receive roughly two to three hours of homework per week — significantly less than the two to three hours per day common in many other developed countries.
What makes this remarkable is not the absence of pressure. It is the presence of something better. Finnish education functions on trust — trust in teachers as professionals and trust in children as capable learners. It also trusts the process of genuine development over time, rather than the measurement of short-term outcomes. In Finland, parents rarely ask about academics. They are far more interested in whether the children have been outside enough, whether they have been playing and resting, trusting that the learning comes naturally when the time is ripe.
The Equity Dimension
Perhaps the most striking feature of the Finnish model is not its performance but its equity. One of the most remarkable outcomes is the small gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students. Regardless of which school a child attends, the educational standard is consistently high. There are no elite schools or failing schools. The model does not produce a small cohort of exceptional performers at the expense of the majority. Rather, it produces a population of capable, curious, well-adjusted people — which is, arguably, the actual purpose of a school system.
For Indian parents, the contrast with their own context is hard to ignore. The pressure that Indian students face is enormous — board examinations, coaching institutes, and concentrated family aspiration all converge on a single child’s performance. This sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from Finnish philosophy. Finland demonstrates that this pressure is not necessary. High performance and genuine wellbeing are not in conflict. Schools getting education right in Finland confirm they are mutually reinforcing — and the PISA results back this up.
Also Read: The Gap Year Question: Waste of Time or Wise Investment?
The Montessori Model: A Century of Child-Centred Learning
Maria Montessori developed her educational approach in early twentieth-century Rome, working initially with children who had been labelled unteachable. Her discovery was not that these children lacked ability. Rather, she found that the traditional classroom had failed to meet them where they were. More than a century later, her approach has become one of the most researched and replicated alternative education models in the world. It stands as a compelling example of schools getting education right.
A longitudinal study using randomised lottery-based admission to Montessori schools found that Montessori children fared significantly better over time on measures of academic achievement, social understanding, and mastery orientation. Notably, they also reported relatively more enjoyment of scholastic tasks. Crucially, Montessori education also equalised outcomes for lower- and higher-income children — a finding with significant implications for educational equity.
The long-term outcomes are equally compelling. A study of 1,905 adults found a plausible association between attending Montessori school as a child and higher adult wellbeing across four dimensions: general wellbeing, engagement, social trust, and self-confidence. The more years of Montessori education, the higher the reported wellbeing.
What Montessori Actually Looks Like
In a Montessori classroom, children choose their own activities from a carefully prepared environment of hands-on learning materials. Mixed-age groupings allow younger children to learn from older peers. Older children consolidate their understanding by teaching others. There are no tests in the early years, no homework, and no grades. Instead, there is rigorous, self-directed work. Over time, this builds deep concentration, independence, and an intrinsically motivated relationship with learning.
Montessori schools now operate across India, from Bengaluru to Chennai to Mumbai. Many operate alongside mainstream board curricula in the early years before transitioning to CBSE or ICSE in upper primary. Parents considering this path should look for schools that implement the full Montessori method rather than adaptations that use the name while retaining traditional assessment structures — research suggests that the original principles produce the strongest outcomes, while modern adapted forms may be less effective.
Reggio Emilia: When Children Are the Co-Authors of Learning
The Reggio Emilia approach emerged in northern Italy in the aftermath of the Second World War, developed by educator Loris Malaguzzi and the parents who lived in the town of Reggio Emilia. Their central conviction was that children are not passive recipients of adult knowledge. Rather, children are active constructors of meaning. They are capable of extraordinary intellectual and creative work when given the right environment and the right relationships.
The Reggio approach is positively associated with outcomes related to employment, socio-emotional skills, high school graduation, and other measures of long-term flourishing. Its influence has spread far beyond Italy. Schools in Singapore, New Zealand, the United States, and increasingly India draw on Reggio principles in their early childhood programmes.
What distinguishes schools offering education the right way through a Reggio lens is the emphasis on documentation. This involves carefully observing and recording children’s thinking. That thinking is then displayed on walls, shared with families, and used by teachers to plan the next stage of learning. The classroom environment is considered the “third teacher.” It is designed with the same intentionality as the human relationships it contains. Projects emerge from children’s questions and interests, sometimes lasting weeks or months, going wherever curiosity leads.
Reggio Emilia encourages collaborative, project-based learning that fosters creativity, social interaction, and critical thinking — while Montessori emphasises self-directed, individual learning that builds independence, imagination, and problem-solving. The two approaches are often presented as alternatives, but the most thoughtful schools draw on both — using Montessori’s carefully sequenced environment alongside Reggio’s emphasis on collaboration, creativity, and documentation of children’s evolving thinking.
Delhi’s Happiness Curriculum: Progressive Education at Scale
One of the most significant examples of schools getting education right in India is not a private progressive institution. It is a government school initiative. In July 2018, the Delhi government launched the Happiness Curriculum. This was a daily 35-minute class for every student from nursery to Class 8, across all 1,024 government schools in the city.
The curriculum addresses students’ wellbeing and happiness, with a strong emphasis on mindfulness, self-awareness, critical thinking, reflection, and other social-emotional skills. It was co-developed by 40 teachers and five NGOs with expertise in life skills, psychology, and social-emotional learning. Crucially, the curriculum carries no grades, no examinations, and no formal assessment. Evaluation is entirely qualitative. This is a deliberate choice to protect this space from the performance anxiety that pervades the rest of Indian schooling.
What the Research Found
The Brookings Institution India Centre conducted a study of the Happiness Curriculum in 2020. Students showed better relationships with their teachers, increased class participation, and greater focus and mindfulness. They became more reflective about disagreements with peers and more insightful about dynamics at home. Teachers reported a genuine shift in their own orientation — moving from prioritising academic outcomes to prioritising values. Collaboration between teachers also increased meaningfully in the process.
A subsequent study found that Delhi’s Happiness Curriculum significantly improved students’ emotional regulation, resilience, empathy, and overall wellbeing. The programme has since inspired similar initiatives in Uttarakhand and Nagaland. The organisations behind it aim to scale social-emotional learning curricula across seven Indian state education systems. That would potentially reach over four million students.
For parents whose children attend government schools, Delhi’s Happiness Curriculum offers a powerful counterpoint to the idea that progressive education belongs only to elite institutions. It demonstrates that the principles behind schools getting education right — prioritising wellbeing, building emotional skills, trusting children’s inner lives — can work at scale. Public systems can deliver them. And measurable results follow.
Rishi Valley: An Indian Vision of Whole-Person Education
In the Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh, Rishi Valley School has been practising a form of education that most of the world is only now beginning to articulate. It has been doing so since 1926. Founded on the educational philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the school holds a conviction that genuine education must go far beyond intellectual development. The whole person — emotional, aesthetic, moral — is equally its concern.
Krishnamurti’s vision was to create a “complete human being” — equipping the child with technological proficiency to function in the modern world, and more importantly, cultivating an environment where the child may “flower in goodness,” developing inward understanding, aesthetic sensitivity, and right relationships with people, nature, and ideas. The 360-acre campus — officially a Bird Sanctuary since 1991 — serves as a living classroom. Conservation, biodiversity, and the students’ relationship with the natural world are woven into daily life rather than cordoned off as extracurricular activities.
The RIVER Programme: Taking It to the Villages
What makes Rishi Valley especially significant is not just its residential school but its outreach programme. RIVER (Rishi Valley Institute for Educational Resources) developed what is now known as the Multi-grade Multi-level, or MGML, learning methodology. MGML was designed specifically for rural schools where a single teacher may be responsible for children across multiple ages and learning levels. This context describes a significant proportion of India’s rural education landscape.
MGML replaces textbooks and examinations with activity-based, child-centred learning, allowing students to progress at their own pace. Students absent from school do not lose out — they resume from exactly where they left off on the Learning Ladder. Older children assist younger ones. Faster learners are not held back. The methodology has since been adopted by UNICEF and several Indian state governments, extending its reach across the country.
For parents reflecting on what schools getting education right look like in an Indian rural context, RIVER demonstrates something important. Child-centred, self-paced, relationship-based learning is not a luxury of well-resourced private schools. It is a practical, replicable model. Moreover, it has worked in some of India’s most under-resourced classrooms for over three decades.
Social-Emotional Learning: The Evidence Base Every Parent Should Know
Running through every example in this article is a commitment to what researchers call social-emotional learning, or SEL. This is central to what schools working to offer the right education consistently prioritise — and understanding the evidence base helps parents assess any school, not just progressive or alternative ones. It equips them to ask better questions about what is happening in their child’s classroom — and whether that classroom reflects what evidence says children actually need.
A meta-analysis of 213 school-based SEL programmes involving 270,034 students found that SEL participants demonstrated significantly improved social and emotional skills, attitudes, behaviour, and academic performance — reflecting a 11 percentile-point gain in achievement compared to controls. These gains held across gender, ethnicity, income, and other demographic variables. SEL is not a programme for disadvantaged children. It is a universal lever for human development.
The five core competencies developed by effective SEL programmes are self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. These are not soft skills in the dismissive sense that phrase is sometimes used. Rather, they are the foundational capacities for academic success, occupational performance, and healthy relationships across a lifetime. Schools getting education right treat them with the same seriousness they give to mathematics or science.
What Good SEL Looks Like in Schools
Schools that offer the right education through SEL do not treat it as a separate subject bolted onto the timetable. Instead, they weave it into the school’s culture — in how conflicts are addressed and how teachers speak to students. The question underlying all of it is whether children feel genuinely seen and valued by the adults around them. The most effective SEL schools embed social, emotional, and academic development into their daily work, rather than treating social and emotional learning as supplementary to the academic curriculum.
In India, the National Education Policy 2020 explicitly calls for integrating social-emotional learning and holistic development across the school curriculum. Several progressive Indian schools — particularly those affiliated with the IB and Cambridge — have moved ahead of the broader system in implementing these approaches. Their experience shows what is possible when schools offer quality education and operate effectively, with genuine institutional commitment. Yet Delhi’s Happiness Curriculum demonstrates that transformation does not require an international board or a private school fee structure. Commitment, training, and the willingness to measure success differently are the essential ingredients.
Restorative Practices: Rethinking Discipline
One of the clearest indicators of a school providing education the right way is how it handles conflict and misconduct. Traditional school discipline is punitive: rules are broken, consequences are imposed, and the matter is considered closed. Restorative practice takes a fundamentally different view. When harm occurs in a school community, the priority is not punishment but repair. That means rebuilding the relationship, addressing the impact on the person harmed, and supporting the person who caused the harm in taking genuine responsibility for their actions.
Restorative practices replace punitive and exclusionary disciplinary approaches with proactive development of community caring, coping mechanisms, and conflict-resolution skills. Schools implementing restorative practices report fewer disciplinary incidents, a better school climate, higher-quality teacher-student relationships, and improved academic achievement. These are not marginal gains. They are systemic improvements in the conditions that enable learning.
A systematic review found that implementing restorative practices in schools decreased school violence and improved students’ emotional wellbeing, reducing perceptions of victimisation and strengthening students’ sense of belonging. Belonging — the felt sense that one is known, valued, and included — is one of the strongest predictors of both academic engagement and mental health in school-age children. No examination result can manufacture it. A school that produces it through its culture is doing something profoundly important.
For Indian parents, restorative practice may feel like a significant departure from the disciplinary cultures familiar from their own schooling. The instinct in many Indian schools — and many Indian homes — is that structure, authority, and consequence form the foundations of good behaviour. Restorative practice does not abandon structure. Rather, it changes what the structure is for: not compliance, but genuine moral development and the repair of human relationships.
What Parents Can Do: Questions Worth Asking
Parents cannot always choose their child’s school. Fees, geography, board requirements, and family circumstances all constrain the options available. However, understanding what schools that provide education the right way actually do empowers every parent to engage more meaningfully with their child’s school, regardless of its type or resources.
Ask About Wellbeing, Not Just Results
How does the school support children who are struggling emotionally? Is there a trained counsellor? How are conflicts between students handled? What does a typical Monday morning feel like for a child who is anxious or sad? These questions reveal a school’s actual values more reliably than its prospectus or its examination results.
Ask About Assessment
Does the school use formative assessment — regular, low-stakes feedback that helps teachers and children understand progress? Or does it rely primarily on examinations that rank and grade students against each other? Do teachers know each child individually, or are they managing a class of forty with limited scope for genuine attention?
Ask About Play and Rest
For younger children, especially, the amount and quality of free play time matter enormously. By limiting homework and protecting time for rest, play, and family, schools ensure that children have the conditions for healthy development and genuine learning readiness. A school that sends eight-year-olds home with two hours of homework every evening is making a choice about childhood that the evidence does not support.
Ask About the Teachers
How long do teachers typically stay? High turnover suggests low morale, which in turn suggests a school culture that does not value its educators. Are teachers given professional development time? Do they have autonomy in their classrooms, or are they following a rigid script? Teachers who feel trusted and respected develop the emotional capacity to trust and respect their students in return. That relationship is the engine of almost everything meaningful in a child’s school experience.
India’s NEP 2020: The Systemic Shift on the Horizon
It would be incomplete to discuss schools getting education right in India without acknowledging the National Education Policy 2020. NEP 2020 is the most significant reform to India’s education system in three decades. It explicitly mandates a shift away from rote learning and examination pressure towards holistic development, critical thinking, creativity, and the integration of social-emotional learning across all stages of schooling.
NEP 2020 explicitly calls for wellness integration to address post-pandemic anxieties, academic pressures, and social challenges faced by over 260 million Indian schoolchildren. The policy envisions schools as communities of learning where children develop not just academic knowledge but life skills, emotional intelligence, and civic responsibility. It represents, on paper, the most significant official acknowledgement in Indian educational history that what children feel matters as much as what they know. Schools getting education right today are simply early adopters of that direction. They are ahead of the curve — and the research confirms they are on the right side of it.
The gap between policy and practice remains significant. Implementation across India’s enormously diverse and resource-variable school system is a decades-long project. However, the direction is clear. Schools getting education right — whether private progressive institutions or government schools running Happiness Curriculum sessions — are no longer operating against the grain of Indian educational policy. They are ahead of the curve of where the system is heading. That distinction matters to parents choosing schools today.
What This Means for Your Child
Every parent reading this article is making choices — or navigating constraints — in the middle of real life. Not every family can access a Montessori school or a progressive boarding institution. Not every city has a Delhi-style Happiness Curriculum running in its government schools. Geography, income, board requirements, and family expectations all shape what is possible.
Nevertheless, understanding how schools that provide effective education actually function changes how parents engage with the school their child attends. The questions parents ask at parent-teacher meetings change. What parents celebrate at home changes too — whether they praise effort and curiosity, or only results and grades. It changes what they model in their own relationship with learning, failure, and emotional difficulty. And it changes what they ask of the school, with the confidence that comes from knowing what the research actually says.
Researchers on what makes children flourish are no longer ambiguous. Children learn best when they feel safe. Deep engagement follows when curiosity drives the work. Resilience develops when children are allowed to struggle, fail, and try again without shame. Children build the emotional capacities that carry them through adulthood when the adults in their lives take those capacities seriously — at home and at school. That means treating emotional development with the same rigour given to mathematics.
Schools that get education right have understood this. Families who engage with those schools — who ask the right questions, hold the right values, and resist the pressure to reduce a child to a percentile — give their children the fullest possible chance to become the people they are capable of being.
The schools exist. The evidence is clear. The only question remaining is whether we are ready to demand it.
Which of these approaches resonates most with you as a parent? We would love to hear your thoughts.
