What 8,000 parent reviews tell us about Delhi NCR schools

What we looked at

8,247 OTP-verified reviews across 312 Delhi NCR schools, submitted between October 2024 and February 2026. Each review carries a 1-5 star rating, free-text body, and five subscores (academics, infrastructure, teachers, extracurriculars, safety).

The five most-mentioned topics in 5-star reviews

Class teacher (mentioned in 71% of 5-star reviews). Specific, named, often with multiple terms of context.
Communication with parents (53%). Frequency, tone, response time on a child concern.
Academic rigour (44%). Always paired with one of: peer group, faculty, prep for board exams.
Sports / co-curricular access (39%). Most-cited: athletics meet participation, mandatory swimming, theatre.
Safe campus (33%). Bus discipline, security, anti-bullying response.

The five most-mentioned topics in 1-star reviews

Fee revision unilaterally (62%). Mid-year, without consultation, often higher than the published cap.
Teacher turnover (58%). Same class, three teachers in 18 months.
Communication failure on a child issue (47%). Bullying, academic concern, lost item, no follow-up.
Bus operations (44%). Late, unsafe, or rude conduct.
Discrimination concerns (29%). Generally about preferential treatment based on parent occupation, donation history, or alumni status.

What is striking

The brochure language ("world-class infrastructure", "smartboard classrooms", "international curriculum") shows up almost never in actual parent reviews. The infrastructure subscore correlates +0.31 with overall rating, which is real but small. The teacher subscore correlates +0.74 — by far the strongest predictor of overall satisfaction.

The takeaway

Pick a school by the people in it, not the building. The subscore that matters most is the one that costs schools the least to invest in (good teachers, retained over time) and the one they advertise the least.

Methodology note

5-star reviews and 1-star reviews are not equally distributed across schools. Aggregated topic counts above use review-level data; readers should consider that 1-star reviews concentrate at a small subset of schools, so the topic mix reflects acute failure modes rather than the typical school's average parent experience.

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