Ecole Globale's Ascent to India's No. 1 Girls' Boarding School

On a black May night in 1984, high on the Lhotse glacier where the wind carves the ice into knives, a wall of snow tore loose above the sleeping camp of the Indian Everest expedition and buried a tent with a young woman inside. A twenty-nine-year-old from Nakuri, who had grown up hearing the prophecy that hill girls become schoolteachers, and that the mountains are not a career, was clawed out, and in the bruised days that followed when more than half the expedition retreated, she looked up.

On 23 May 1984, Bachendri Pal became the first triumphant Indian woman to stand upon the roof of the world. The soft humming chants of Uttarakhand had whispered to its daughters that success is earned, one frozen foothold at a time. Placing one’s mark on the summit of education is conventionally believed to be the golden dawn greeting after several patient footholds.

Like the climber who was once told that she was not meant for the mountains, in October 2025, École Globale International Girls’ School, at the base of the same Himalayas, where morning mist still covers the Doon Valley like muslin, has gently unclipped that assumption from its anchor to ascend to become the No. 1 Girls' Boarding School in India, and No. 1 in Uttarakhand, in the EducationWorld India Academy Rankings (EWISR) 2025–26 for International schools in India.

It is worth pausing upon the weight of that sentence, for a ranking is only as meaningful as the rigour that underwrites it.

The EWISR, regarded as the most comprehensive schools survey in the world, draws its authority from painstaking field research: some 9,500 careful interactions with parents, principals, teachers and educationists across the country, weighing more than 4,500 schools in India against fourteen parameters of excellence, from the competence of faculty and individual attention to co-curricular breadth and emotional well-being.

Conducted by EducationWorld in association with AZ Research Partners, Bangalore, it is, in the plainest terms, the considered verdict of the very people who know schools best.

To earn that verdict in Dehradun carries a gravity all its own. Sheltered in India's academy capital, are names that have gathered a century of ivy; to stand at the summit of such, and to have arrived there young, is no small feat.

École Globale has climbed the way seasoned mountaineers ascend, and in 2025–26 it stands where the air is thinnest and the view widest.

Such an ascent is not serendipitous.

A healthy teacher-to-student ratio makes individual attention real, not a brochure promise. A dual pathway braids CBSE with Cambridge International, so a girl may write the Indian entrance examinations with one hand and knock upon the world's great universities with the other.

Boarding school life envelopes activities such as horse riding, swimming, dance, music and art. The ever-present medical care and a vigilant pastoral team provide reassurance to parents. And the school's gaze, like any climber's, keeps lifting to farther ridgelines, so no girl mistakes the valley's rim for the horizon.

Reflecting on this achievement, the Principal, Ms Kanchan Khandke, proudly remarks:

“I attribute this promotion to our institutional culture of accepting challenges and responding with determination.”

“It is our earnest endeavour to keep expanding the opportunities and experiences that we offer to our girls,” resolutely asserts Ms Puja Pant, the Vice Principal.

Emphasising École’s learning principle, the Academic Head, Mr Varun Kumar affirms that,

“Education ecosystem at Ecole is a reflection of the school’s vision to nurture confident, responsible, and future-ready learners.”

Bachendri Pal's narrative has a last thread that shimmers in the sun like a climbing rope. Her greatest legacy is everything that came after the summit.

That is ultimately the responsibility a No. 1 ranking confers upon a school, and École Globale International Girls’ School intends to shoulder it as a torchbearer for every Indian girl who looks up at her mountain.

The view from the top is splendid but the duty from the top is greater.

Here's to excellence. Here's to École Globale.