New Indian Model School

Most Indian-curriculum schools abroad teach one syllabus and sit one board's papers. This one does not. SPEA's inspection report records the examination board for New Indian Model School as Central Board of Secondary Education and, on the following line, Kerala State Board. The school's admission page says the same thing in its own words - it follows both the CBSE and Kerala Board curriculums - and its results page carries separate honours lists for Class 12 and Class 10 CBSE toppers and for Kerala Board SSLC toppers. For a family that moved from Kerala mid-schooling and wants a child to finish on the syllabus they started, that is not a marketing line, it is the answer to the question. It is also the single hardest thing to find out about a Sharjah school from anywhere else, because CBSE's register lists only CBSE and no aggregator records a second board.

The second-language list follows from the same demographic logic and is the longest in the emirate that we could verify. The school publishes six options: Malayalam, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Bengali and Arabic. That is not a brochure claim left untested - SPEA's reviewers sat in the lessons and reported on them individually, noting good listening and speaking in Hindi, Malayalam and Tamil, and specifically that writing skills were underdeveloped in Bengali. A regulator naming Bengali as a taught subject in a Sharjah classroom is about as solid as this kind of fact gets. What the school does not publish is the grade at which each option becomes available, so a parent still has to ask whether a given language runs in a given year group.

The school describes an opening in 1982 with thirty pupils; SPEA's inspection report records the same establishment year, while the authority's directory card carries 25 March 2003, which is almost certainly the licence rather than the founding. It belongs to NIMS Group UAE, founded in Dubai in 1980 by Dr M. K. Kamaluddin, which also operates New Indian Model School Dubai, The Central School Dubai, NIMS Al Ain and Imprint Sharjah. The chair of the board of governors, recorded by SPEA as Zakir Hussain Kalmaluddin, is the group's vice chairman. The inspectors noted the effect of that structure directly, observing that the school receives effective support from the group's central support team - an advantage a standalone school does not have and a dependency worth understanding.

The Itqan trajectory is the most encouraging in this batch. SPEA reviewed the school over four days on 27 to 30 January 2025 and rated it Good, up from Acceptable at the 2023-24 review. The reviewers credited improvements in mathematics, science and other subjects, outstanding attendance, teaching and assessment now good overall, very good care and support, very good relationships with parents, and very good governance. They also wrote a sentence that a parent should read before signing anything: the learning environment remains rather cramped and resources for teaching and learning are limited. That is a regulator describing a building, and it sits alongside a roll of 2,555 pupils on a campus of about 12,500 square metres, with 236 children on the special-educational-needs register.

Everyday logistics here are organised around gender and shifted start times, which is unusual enough to catch families out. The campus runs as two separate buildings. Kindergarten runs 07:00 to 10:45. The girls' section, Classes 1 to 12, runs 07:00 to 13:50. The boys' section, Classes 3 to 12, runs 08:10 to 15:20. A household with a daughter in Class 4 and a son in Class 6 is therefore managing two different school days at the same address, and the boys' day finishes an hour and a half after the girls'. The site maintains separate section pages for boys and girls at Classes 6 to 10 and again at Classes 11 and 12.

On fees the school sits near the bottom of the Sharjah range. SPEA's approved 2025-26 letter runs from AED 4,155 in kindergarten to AED 6,955 in Classes 11 and 12, tuition and books together, with uniform at AED 200 to 300. The school's own signed schedule for the same year lists AED 4,160 through AED 6,960 - five dirhams higher at every step, a rounding artefact rather than a discrepancy worth arguing about - and clarifies the billing rhythm: fees are charged over ten months, with nothing due for the July and August vacation. Transport runs AED 300 to 330 a month on top. Set against a roll of 2,555 and a Good rating, this is among the cheapest routes to an inspected, dual-board Indian education in the emirate.