This category has been one of the hardest to shortlist. The vast majority of outstanding IB schools are blended, so this category has carried the majority of the “big guns” in UAE IB schooling. Understatement: Shortlisting these final six schools has been a challenge.

 So, what have we looked for here in order to help us guide our judges?

First, we have focused on the inclusiveness of cultural and academic intake and mapped this onto the breadth of provision post-16.

SchoolsCompared.com has lobbied widely for all IB schools to provide the IB Career-related Programme or stand-alone BTEC vocational/technical stream alternatives. Historically, with the IB CP, this was not possible for schools in Abu Dhabi because the qualification was not recognised – this is no longer the case today. Even where a school is more academically selective, we think the argument for providing a technical stream alternative to the International Baccalaureate Diploma is pretty much bullet proof for schools genuinely committed to meet the needs, interests, potential, ambition and ability of all students.

Some children are academic and technical. Whilst less of an issue in the UAE, the Diploma very poorly represents otherwise academic children who are weak in a second language – this not true of the CP which treats languages differently and arguably much more rationally.

The general downgrading of technical and vocational education and the prejudices that have driven it we think have historically hurt children wherever applied, and these Awards are one way of supporting and empowering those schools which have prioritised inclusion through (often expensive investment in) subject breadth.

Second, we have looked at the progress children make throughout their schooling. We have taken our lead from post-16 performance when we have looked at attainment, or looked at it in the context of PYP entrance as a way to substantiate selection. The best school is not the school, necessarily, that gets the best results – it is, quite rightly, the one that has delivered the best progress against predicted flightpaths.

Third, we have weighed our own visits to schools. As we always evangelise with parents, you can only tell so much on paper, league tables and the like. During our visits we weight more than a hundred criteria – from whether security guards insist on returning our security passes when we leave a school (you would be surprised at how many do not) to how children relate to us when we independently speak with them – in most cases we achieve this without it being set up in any way by the schools. The same holds true of teaching faculty and parents who we endeavour to speak with on promise of confidentiality away from school leadership. We rate the perceived happiness of children and their engagement very highly. All of this is backed from independent feedback we receive directly through our sites.

We have also looked at the broader splay of subject choice and provision outside core academics. Rightly or wrongly, and often perhaps against the priority for parents, we value investment in the whole child – and that means looking at ECAs and broader Arts (Art, Music, Drama, Debating and so on) and sporting provision outside the core academic syllabus.

We look for evidence of on-going investment. The impact of this, perhaps unfairly, is that schools that are well established tend to have a greater crack of the whip for us. New schools may well start with clear signs of investment – but we are looking for owners who are not simply looking to extract profit after a first initial investment – however large that may have been. Schools can generally prove this only over time. 

Finally, we have looked at school leadership and the feedback we have received from parents, teachers and in some cases children direct to Editors or through feedback on our sites. It’s become somewhat of a platitude that leadership is important. In a school, however, we think that it’s absolutely make-or-break. This lends complication where we have outstanding schools facing flux and change because of leadership changes or changes to owners – this considerably weakens the case in many cases because we are facing an unknown quantity.”

Given that these are blended schools, we have also looked at how blending has worked within these schools in practice, generally through a fissure of school curriculum Post-16 to transition from an alternative curriculum to the IB. It sounds simpler than it is. Not all curricular are well placed to offer easy transition, although arguably IGCSE suffers less than others given its depth of academic study and, in the schools represented here, breadth of subject offer.

The outright winner of last year’s top award for the SchoolsCompared.com Best School in the UAE 2018, it should not be surprising that we can find little to critique in Jumeirah English Speaking School Arabian Ranches – and much to celebrate.

The departure of Mark Steed, in our view one of the UAE’s most stand-out Principals, is probably the single aspect of change that differentiates our view of the school this year in our environmental scanning, then and now, of the opportunities and threats faced by the school moving forward. It’s unarguable that his role in shaping and leading the school has been instrumental and profound.

Whilst it does not shape our view, it’s also worth noting the short-lived downgrade of the school’s rating by the KHDA to Very Good with Outstanding features which fell into the period of our judging. This was a shock to the school, and the broader British and IB school community, and turned on a disagreement with data metrics now addressed with the return of Outstanding school status. In this particular case we know that the grading did not reflect the reality of beyond-outstanding school performance and the decision could certainly be seen as being harsh.