Off to Dubai tomorrow, to open the sixth form centre at Al Diyafah High School. The new facility is dedicated to the Mother, sadly deceased, of the family who own the School. Winnie would be incredibly proud of what her daughter and son-in-law have made of their project. There are good families at the heart …
Marcel joined me in running a set of strategy workshops last week, in Cairo and Upper Egypt. We are finding that we are being asked to provide more and more help to investors at the point of ‘buy’ or ‘sell’. Marcel has probably been engaged in over half the big deals in education, worldwide, over …
A very powerful way to change the conversation with students and parents is to introduce a dialogue about Strengths into your school. There are useful (and free) questionnaires on the Penn University website, overseen by the excellent psychologist Martin Seligman. They help students uncover their relative strengths (stop worrying about the weaknesses for a minute!) …
Our friends and clients at SOBHA Group have pulled off a great achievement by partnering with North London Collegiate School, in London, to win the open competition for a new school in Singapore. Congratulations to all involved, including the excellent Parthenon group, who were very active in providing data and analytics. Their wholehearted commitment to …
This is definitely the best book I have read on Education in the last decade. And it’s not an education book per se: ‘The Happiness Hypothesis’. Jonathan Haidt introduces his readers to the world of positive psychology and it is this body of ideas that we should be using to help us design the schools of …
I have called this, the Age of the Teacher because there has never been a better time to enter the profession. That fact is not recognised by many commentators. It’s always nice to be name-checked – thank you, Phil and Conor for the credit you gave me for the UK’s uplift in teacher recruitment – but …
My new piece, co-written with my friends at the Royal Society for the Arts (RSA) in the UK, takes a look at the rapidly expanding world of international schools. Long gone are the days when a few embassy schools sought to provide a reassuring education to local ex-pats with a few locals hanging on. Several …
It is rare to find families at home doing science experiments together but it is fabulous when you see it in action. It is fun for all and you can get a good discussion going about science and about science at school. Take a look at this excellent site, from Scientific American: www.scientificamerican.com/education/bring-science-home/ It will …
One of the phenomena that you come across in international education is the ambitious family. I don’t mean ambitious just for themselves, I mean ambitious for their own children and for the community. Many private international schools have been started by these families. In the UAE, there is a strong group of them, many Indian …
