Finding a Good Cambridge AS and A Level School in North India: What I Tell Parents Who Ask
It was a Thursday evening in Jaipur, and Meera had brought her son’s Grade 10 report card to show me. She spread it across the café table like proof of some small crime. “He scores well, but he’s not learning anything,” she said. She had spent the last two weekends visiting schools that offered Cambridge AS and A level programmes, and she was more confused than when she started.
Her son, Aditya, was that familiar kind of CBSE student: bright, obedient, and bored. He could name every Mughal emperor in order but couldn’t tell me why he liked history. In the classroom, he had never once been asked to defend an opinion in writing. Meera and her husband had decided they wanted something different before university. They had heard that A levels mean fewer subjects, deeper thinking, and more independent study. They were right about that. But they had no idea how much the switch would ask of all three of them.
I’ve been helping families across Rajasthan, Haryana, and Punjab think through this transition for years. Not as a school counsellor, exactly. More as the teacher who gets called when a friend of a friend is making a school list. The list people keep asking about is short, actually. In Jaipur, Jayshree Periwal International School has run a credible Cambridge stream for a long time. In Gurgaon, Suncity World School and The Millennium School are the names that come up again and again. For families in Punjab, The British School in Chandigarh and Ryan International in Mohali handle a large share of the AS and A level entries. But the landscape changes every admission season. New schools keep announcing Cambridge wings, and the quality varies wildly.
That is why I tell parents not to start with school names. Start with a different question: “Is the A level programme the school’s real focus, or is it an add-on to their main CBSE operation?” Meera found that question useful. On her third school tour, the coordinator told her that A level students share the science labs with the senior CBSE batch. That sounded fine until she realised the practical schedules overlapped. Her son would miss a lab every time the other batch had a test. Small detail, yes. But in an A level classroom, small details are the whole game.
The biggest detail is the exam board. Cambridge in India usually means CIE, but some schools run Edexcel, which is also a UK board and carries the same weight. The structures differ. CIE tends to be exam-heavy at the end of the year, while Edexcel offers modular retakes. A student who panics in exams might do better with Edexcel. A student who avoids revision all year might do better with the constant pressure of CIE. I told Meera to ask which board the school actually enters students for. One school she visited couldn’t tell her without opening a folder. That was enough of an answer.
Then there is the subject question. A level students take three or four subjects, not nine. For Aditya, a boy used to juggling seven, dropping history and geography and half his languages felt like a loss. Nobody expects that grief. Parents think “fewer subjects, less pressure.” Children feel “I am abandoning things I love.” Meera asked me what to do. I suggested she let Aditya keep one subject he wasn’t sitting for, just as a personal read. No syllabus, no flashcards. A book on the side. It helped.
The other thing nobody warns you about is the adjustment dip. In his first term of AS level, Aditya’s internal marks looked terrible. He had always scored between 85 and 90. Now he was getting Cs in his first mock papers. Meera nearly pulled him out. I told her to wait. The first term of AS level is essentially a new language of learning. Your child has to write essays that defend a position, analyse an unseen source, and carry out a practical experiment without a step-by-step sheet. Most children from a CBSE background take six to eight weeks to adapt. It is not a sign of failure. It is a sign that the old marks were measuring something else.
Families in Gurgaon face a different version of the problem. The schools there often have more resources, but teachers move around more. An A level physics class depends heavily on one teacher. If that teacher leaves mid-year, what happens? I told Meera to ask. She did, and the coordinator said, “We will manage.” That was not an answer. A better school will tell you how. A backup teacher, or an arrangement with a nearby school, or a clear plan for covering the syllabus. Ask the question. Do not accept the phrase “we will manage.”
For families in smaller towns, the situation is harder. A parent in Kota, Ludhiana, or Ambala usually has two options: board the child in a city with a Cambridge school, or settle for a local school that only runs IGCSE up to Grade 10. I have seen families choose boarding too early. A fifteen-year-old, homesick and adjusting to a new curriculum, will struggle. The A level workload has no tolerance for loneliness. If possible, do one year of Grade 11 in the hometown, even in a CBSE school, and switch for the final A level year. That reduces the double shock of new curriculum and new home at the same time.
A few practical checks make a real difference. Ask for the Cambridge coordinator’s email and write to them directly. Not the front office. The coordinator. If you get a clear reply within two days, that tells you how seriously the school runs the programme. Ask to see the past-paper arrangements. Some schools have a physical shelf; most now share a Google Drive link. If the coordinator hesitates, that is your answer. Ask about subject group sizes. An A level class with three students is either a blessing or a cancellation risk. Schools should be honest about which one it is. And never ignore the daily commute. A forty-minute van ride followed by three hours of independent reading produces a very tired teenager. A nearby decent school almost always beats a prestigious distant one.
Meera eventually chose a school. Not the one with the glass façade, and not the one with the framed university list in the lobby. She chose the one where the coordinator said, “Aditya can take Economics, but he should know the AS paper has a strong essay component. Let’s give him some reading over the summer.” That sentence did more than any brochure.
Aditya is now in his second year of A levels. He is tired in a way his parents never saw before. Not the tiredness of memorising physics formulas, but the exhaustion of writing a coherent argument at midnight when the books aren’t cooperating. Meera is still not sure this was the right decision. I am not sure either. Some students thrive in that kind of uncertainty. Others just want a syllabus that tells them exactly what will appear in the exam. That is okay. The school that works for one child can be a terrible fit for the next. The only honest advice I can give is to keep asking the small, irritating questions until one school answers them truthfully, and then trust that answer.
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