Indian School Al Wadi Al Kabir , established in 1978, is located in the city ofMuscat, Oman. The school was founded by an Indian born Omani businessman Khimji Ramdas. Mr. Lobo was principal of the school since 1990 to Spring 2008.Later there was another principal Mr.P.N.Ashok who resigned in 2012. The present principal is Mr. D. Nageswar Rao.
History and background
The school was established in 1978 and welcomed its first set of students on 2 July of the same year. After fifty years of steady progress, the school celebrated its Golden jubilee on 1 November 1991. Though originally a Gujarati medium school, the school began to feel a growing pressure and demand to convert the medium of instruction to English so as to meet the challenges of the modern era. The management in June 1987 effected this change. Prior to 1993 it was situated at different locations and the growing demand for admission began to strain its existing facilities. It was therefore, decided to shift the entire school to a larger and well-designed building that would offer better facilities in terms of a large playground, spacious classrooms, laboratories, a hall and adequate administrative space. In 1992, it was also decided to upgrade it to secondary level. An application for a composite affiliation was made in the academic year 1992-93. The rented premises of the school and its future plans for a state-of-the-art school building were inspected in November 1992 and the school was granted composite affiliation until Grade X for 1993. The first batch of Class X students appeared at the AISS Examination of the C.B.S.E. in March 1996. It was upgraded to Senior Secondary School in 1999 and the first batch of Class XII students appeared at the Board examination in 2001. The current school building was constructed in 1992–93 and occupied in the beginning of the following academic year. As it is located in an area called Al Wadi Al Kabir, Indian School Muttrah as it was called from 1987, was renamed Indian School Al Wadi Al Kabir as per the instructions of the Directorate of the Ministry of Education. This building, apart from having spacious, airy and sunlit classrooms, also has all the facilities that are required of a good school, like separate science laboratories, IT laboratories, a library, an art room, a music room, a multi-purpose hall with facilities for indoor games, and adequate space for some outdoor games. By the time the school moved to the new premises in Wadi Kabir, the number enrolled had increased and an afternoon shift was introduced on the same premises. However, because the two-shift system was very inconvenient to parents and students, it was abolished and pre-primary and some of the primary classes were shifted to rented premises. At the same time plans were being prepared for a new state-of-the-art building in Wadi Kabir, which was ready in July 2000. It currently houses kinder garden and Classes I to V. Since of late additions have been made to the school. The primary grounds were extended in order to accommodate larger crowds for events. In 2008, two more floors were added to the senior school in order to deal with the rising strength of the school.By 2015-16 every classroom was equipped with smart boards and projectors and in December 2015 construction was started in the senior school to add more class rooms. Pre-primary classes had already been housed in premises very close to this building in 1997.In 2018 elevators were installed in every floor for easy facilitation of movement of students and teachers respectively.
Academics
ISWK is a public, co-educational day school that is under the Central Board of Secondary Education of India. The school offers complete educational services starting from Kindergarten through to 12th grade senior school and follows the CBSE syllabus. Classes 11 and 12 students can choose from two streams of specializations, Commerce or Science. The subjects include accountancy, business studies, mathematics, economics, entrepreneurship, infomatics, physical and health education, computer science, biology, physics and chemistry. The school also offers foreign languages such as French, Malayalam, Sanskrit and Arabic for classes 6 to 10. Second language are taught till 10th, whereas Third language are taught till 8th.
Faculty
The best asset of the school are its teachers; they form its backbone. All the teachers of the school are well qualified. To keep them in touch with developments in the field of education, frequent in-house workshops are conducted. Apart from these, in-service workshops by experts in different subjects are also periodically conducted. Some of these that have been held in the past few years were in Hindi, Mathematics and Social Studies at the Middle and the Secondary level, in Mathematics and Environmental Studies for Primary teachers and on Activity based approach for Kindergarten. Objective-based teaching and evaluation, Value Education in classroom are a few other topics. These staff developmental activities have re-organized teaching to make it activity oriented, project and application-based, with emphasis on the acquisition of the skills of self-learning by children. Methods of evaluation have also undergone a change in keeping with the current teaching-learning approach.
