Too often, a quality education is evaluated only using a school’s examination outcomes. Our schools do teach globally respected curricula and consistently deliver excellent academic outcomes year after year. Our schools have achieved a pass rate of 94.1% percent in the IB diploma, 15 percentage points above the world average, and over a third of our students go on to attend the world’s top universities. But simply using academic or examination outcomes, as important as they are, as the key metric for a quality education is outdated.
With massive, and rapid strides taking place in technology, we are heading into a world of intelligent automation. This new world will not only benefit us in many ways, it will also open up unusual challenges of how people gain employment, because the jobs of tomorrow will be very different to the ones we have today. Preparing for this change has to begin during a child’s early years in order to ingrain the competencies needed for jobs of the future.
Strides in technology have also led to a more globalised, interconnected world. This has brought about an increase in migration and as a result, the growth of larger international communities of people from different social, cultural and racial backgrounds. Additionally, a growing middle class in several developing countries is driving a strong demand from families who wish their children to benefit from a world-class international education.
Combined, these scenarios mean our students must be prepared to collaborate and compete with peers globally. They must develop flexibility, resilience and the ability to thrive in a multicultural, multilingual setting and they must see themselves as global citizens from an early age. So how can educators today prepare students for what tomorrow will bring?
Schools must realise they cannot continue to operate solely as transmitters of knowledge. At Nord Anglia Education, we share international best practice across our schools to provide personalised learning experiences for all our students. Teachers tailor their approach to suit the needs of each individual child, enabling them to not only excel academically, but guide them to develop cognitive abilities that will make them fit for the future. This means the cultivation of both hard and soft skill sets ranging from coding and interpreting big data, to cultural competence, empathy, collaboration and the ability to communicate confidently.
As a family of schools comprising over 50,000 students from 56 schools in 26 countries, NAE represents a truly globalised student body. Our unique position has enabled us to enhance the globally-respected curricula we offer through collaborations with some of the world’s best organisations, exposing students to extraordinary, creative and truly cutting-edge learning experiences and opportunities.
Through our collaboration with The Juilliard School, one of the world’s most renowned performing arts conservatories, we have responded to a call for greater cultural competency, creative problem-solving skills and the ability to communicate confidently. By delivering an enriched learning experience through state-of-the-art keyboard labs and inspirational live performances from visiting Juilliard artist faculty to our schools, we help students to fall in love with the arts, and channel their emotions to express themselves authentically and confidently in all aspects of life.