Cathedral and John Connon School

The grand old name of South Bombay schooling. Founded 1860, in Fort, and the alumni list (Tatas, Rushdie, a former Chief Justice, half the boardrooms in BKC) tells you most of what you need to know about the network your child plugs into.

Dual track: ICSE/ISC plus an IB Diploma stream from Class 11. Academics are genuinely strong and consistently top-ranked nationally. The teaching gets praise, especially in the IB years.

What people who actually live with the school will tell you:

• Admissions are brutal and heavily skewed to alumni and siblings. If you have no Cathedral connection, manage expectations.
• It is a bubble. According to one parent, the school "shields students rather than preparing them for the real world" - fair warning that the SoBo cocoon is real.
• Marking is strict and the pressure is steady rather than crushing. House system, sport, drama, music all matter - not just marks.
• Discipline can lean old-school. One review flagged punishments as "sometimes too harsh and unjustified." Worth asking about during your visit.
• Front-office and bus-staff manner has come up more than once in reviews - small thing, but it sets a tone. The teaching staff get warmer reviews than the admin.
• The social mix is wealthy and tight-knit. Your child will make friends for life; they will also be among children whose families have been here for three generations.

Bottom line: if you can get in, the academics, network, and breadth of opportunity are hard to beat in India. Go in clear-eyed about the bubble and the admin friction. The school itself is genuinely good at what it does.

• Cathedral sits at the top of South Bombay's school hierarchy in online discussion. Mumbai threads consistently place it at or near the top alongside Dhirubhai Ambani and Campion across both ICSE/ISC and IB/IGCSE rankings.
• The student crowd is described as old-money rather than new-celebrity. One parent-style ranking framed it as where the old rich go, doing IB and moving abroad. A current student in 2022 said other people exaggerate how the crowd behaves and that many classmates are very nice. Other voices call current and former students snobbish, a recurring critique that surfaces in city threads.
• Academics are pushed hard and the culture is rigorous and disciplined. One ex-student wrote the school gave them life skills they would not have attained anywhere else and described monthly rotational sweeping duties, fines for long hair and being sent home for not shaving. The same alumnus said they hated the school but were extremely appreciative.
• Selectivity is real. One Reddit comment said John Connon has years of admission backlog. Another described countless quiet withdrawals where children could not cope with the pace, with the school not formally expelling but asking families to transfer.
• One ex-student who later moved to a top UK private school said the British school was academically more rigorous than Cathedral, with smarter peers, but credited Cathedral's network value.