One year on from joining Nord Anglia Education, here is what has actually changed for our students, and what has not. Of the thirty-one improvements delivered this year, seventeen were never meant to be noticed.
When you ask your child how school went, the answer is usually the same. “Fine.”
That single word is, in a sense, the whole job of a school. Fine means the day worked. Lessons happened. Someone was listened to. Something was learned that will only show up years from now. Fine is the sound of a lot of things going right at once.
A year ago, H-FARM International School became part of Nord Anglia Education, and many of you asked a fair question: what will actually change?
A year on, we can answer it honestly. Not who we are. What has changed is how far we can reach.
A bigger world for our students
This year our classrooms started opening outwards. Global Campus connects our students with peers across a network of schools around the world, for shared projects and real collaboration, and it reaches our students this academic year. Our teachers have trained at MIT and are bringing that way of thinking into their lessons, with student-facing MIT and Social Impact opportunities opening now. And the calendar ahead includes a Tanzania expedition, an MIT trip experience, a United Nations experience, and the Global Games hosted here on our campus.
Teachers who keep learning
The most important thing in any classroom is not the technology or the furniture. It is the person standing in front of your child. This year our teachers and school leaders joined international leadership programmes, completed professional learning at MIT, and gained access to Nord Anglia University, a continuous professional development programme used across the whole network. New roles were created inside our school to make sure that learning does not stay with the person who attended the course, but comes back into the classroom.
Places that teach
Our Quantum Lab is open, a space where students can experiment, prototype and solve real problems with robotics, smart devices and AI. Classrooms have been reshaped for collaboration rather than rows. Playgrounds have been renewed. Our boarding houses have new common areas and improved facilities, because for our boarding families this campus is not a school, it is home.
And the part you will never see
Here is the number that surprised us most. Of the thirty-one improvements delivered across our schools this year, seventeen were never meant to be noticed at all.
Trained safeguarding leads in every school. Further training for every member of staff. Protection on every device. Stronger site procedures. School nurses and doctors. One single system bringing together attendance, medical and learning support information, so that the people teaching your child genuinely know your child.
If we have done this work properly, you will never think about any of it. That is exactly the point.
One school, more room to grow
Nord Anglia Education is a network of more than 90 schools in 37 countries, with over 100,000 students. But the size of the network was never the story. What H-FARM can do with it is.
Nothing here arrived from outside. All of it was built by the people you already know, the teachers and staff who greet your children every morning, with more expertise, more connections and more resources around them.
The school you chose is still the school you chose. There is simply more behind it now.
Want the full picture? Read the presentation.