It’s a wonderful thing being a school teacher, being given the chance to help young people grow and learn before they set out on their own journeys.  We work with students, sharing their triumphs with them and we take enormous pleasure in watching them do well.  We look forward to exam results each year and we spend a lot of time reading them, talking about them, analysing them and, quite a lot of the time, just enjoying the successes of our students and former students.

This year was no exception, with opportunities for celebration at all ages.  In the primary school, our year 6 students took SATs in reading, writing and maths.  Scores at levels 4 and 5 were well above the UK expectation in all subjects, with maths in particular standing out: over half of our pupils gained a level 5, over 50% higher than the UK norm.

In the secondary school, our IB students showed that the hard work leading up the exam period was all in a good cause.  IB results are very important to us, so we track our students’ performance via a service in the UK that compares every student’s performance against a range of other schools – including many top UK private schools – so we can be sure that they are all as good as they can be.  This year we were delighted that our year 13’s scores left the comparison schools behind, as they outperformed expectations right across the ability and subject range, about 20% above the UK mean.  Many congratulations to them, and particularly to the six members of our cohort who completed Bilingual Diplomas – no mean feat and one of which they can be rightly proud.   Universities await them: in the UK, Canada, the US, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Korea, Japan and Malaysia so far.

The success continued at GCSE, with outstanding results for a large cohort of students.  Choice of subject is always important, and, with 21 subjects on offer, students had clearly found the subjects they liked.  Our Director of Education in the UK, Professor Deborah Eyre, is the author of a well known paper called “Room at the Top”, in which she talks about high performance for all.   We were delighted to see that our students embraced that this year, with 44% of all grades at A or A*, a remarkable figure which is double the UK average.  They’ve really laid down a marker for next year’s students and their teachers.