Founder principal Mary Roy is known for her sashay into the legal world of Intestate Inheritance. Christian women in Kerala were denied Equal Rights of Inheritance. She challenged the Travancore Succession Act of 1916 which was struck down and now, sons and daughters are given equal rights.

Mary Roy inspires everyone around her. Her daughter, Arundhati had been one of Pallikoodam's first students. Arundhati wrote "The God of Small Things". She is the first Indian to win the Booker Prize. She is equally well known for her political writing on Nuclear Weapons, Dams, American Imperialism, Corporate Globalisation and Kashmir .

In an interview Mary Roy was asked why she started Pallikoodam....

" At the age of thirty, I was clueless about a profession. You had to be clueless if you had only a BA Degree in those days. What suddenly jolted me was this incident.........My son was seven years old, studying in Grade II of Lushington School, Ooty. He came home every day with pieces of handwork, drawings, or a few lines written on half sheets of paper. There was never any homework. He was a happy child. Unfortunately, he began to identify himself with his classmates as being British. He talked about 'those Indian children'. I realized it was time for him to go to an Indian School . So he was admitted in Breeks High School . The first day he came home carrying a bag with sixteen notebooks and ten textbooks. He put them down on the floor and wept! This was my first glimpse of what was wrong with education in India .

I got permission to observe the Junior Classes at Lushington. Studies were low-key, self-learning affairs with lots of conversation and lots of activity. It was an understood rule that even if a child missed routine class, he must not be absent from games.
A look at the end product (i.e. a student in Grade X) convinced me that the Lushington boys were sturdy, confident and had absorbed their lessons to a point which equipped them for life. Their Indian counterparts were over burdened with academic knowledge and lacked confidence.

It was clear that my destiny was to become a schoolteacher. Very soon, I realized that school teachers were not allowed to do what they were taught to do in Colleges of Education . They had to toe the line drawn by Examination Boards and Principals whose main was to please parents and perform well at examinations at any cost. The only way out was to start my own school where I would be the Board and the Principal.

And that's how I started Pallikoodam with seven students at a Hall leased to me by the Rotary Club of Kottayam. At that time the school went by the name of Corpus Christi .

When the numbers grew, I met the magical architect, Laurie Baker who agreed to build my school for me if I would educate his daughter. Heidi Baker is still with me and so is the dream campus with its serpentine roads, that twist and turn through the most exciting kinds of classrooms !… as exciting for children, parents and teachers as it is for me.