Top Schools Awards 2021. Results Live. Safa Community School Awarded The SchoolsCompared.com Top Schools Award for Value Add and Leaving No Child Behind 2021-22

The SchoolsCompared.com Top Schools Award for Value Add and Leaving No Child Behind 2021-22 in the United Arab Emirates is awarded to:

Safa Community School

Winner of The SchoolsCompared.com Award for Best New School in the UAE 2019-20, Safa Community School is one of our rated Top, Tier 1 schools in the UAE – and, today, as an established school, represents one of our most highly recommended schools for parents. Ethically and by conviction non-selective, families join the school from a multiplicity of nationalities, ethnicities, religions and student abilities.

Value-add is an almost impossible science to convey to parents in its detail – but at its simplest it is arguably the most accurate of all measures of a school’s ability to deliver for its children. Whilst many parents continue to focus on examination results in isolation, value-add, instead, looks to the grades children achieve, in practice, above (or below) the baseline expectations of the grades they should theoretically achieve on joining a school. When schools discuss with parents the flight path of their children, they are speaking of the grades that they expect children to achieve at the point of formal examinations based on their abilities on joining the school.

A selective school, that accepts only the brightest children, will naturally secure very high results for its children in examinations. One difficulty is that value-add, for selective schools, becomes immeasurable because exam results, for example in British schools, do not go beyond an A*. If children are predicted to achieve this grade, these schools cannot demonstrate (to the frustration of these schools), through value-add at least, that they are delivering for children any more than they should actually achieve. Equally, if a school only accepts the very brightest children, or those without, for example EAL investment, parents should not infer that, should their children be accepted to these schools, that they would achieve equally highly. In fact, the opposite is almost certainly the case – which is why schools like Dubai College, for example, very creditably in this context restrict their intake.

For a school that is unambiguously inclusive, like Safa Community School, things are different.

What judges have looked at are four elements:

(1) The intake of children with ELL/EAL and SEND within schools;

(2) The added value achieved by schools for children each year to examination; and

(3) The quality of education provided by a school with indicators across subject breadth, whole child development, the happiness of children and engagement with parents – and the ongoing investment in the school in its children; and, finally,

(4) We have focused on schools that have either openly published their value-added scoring for parents with explanation, or schools who have shared their data openly with us.

In this context, Safa Community School shines in its commitment to inclusion by evidencing a significant increase over time of the numbers of children on its role with identifiable ELL/EAL and SEND needs, including those who are gifted and talented. In 2019, 10.4% of Safa Community School’s intake was identified with SEND.  In 2021, this had doubled to almost 20%. In a high achieving school like Safa Community School, this tells parents a lot about the calibre of teaching. By Year 9, 95 % of students at the school achieve at, or above the level of their UK peers, this with a much higher SEND and EAL intake. By Year 11, 79% of students in CAT 4 are scoring at a higher level than their UK peer schools. Between Year 2 and Year 10 based on GL scoring, and KHDA definitions of Outstanding achievement pegged above Stanine 6 score, children achieves an average Very Good to Outstanding ranking between Year 2 and Year 10. Students’ achievement in Mathematics and Science are core strengths.

Translated, Safa works on a minimum plus 1 value add expectation for all children – and a +2 ambition for its brightest children. This is a significantly more ambitious flight path than equivalent schools with this intake. For the 2019-20 GCSE results, the average Value-add score for all Safa Community School children was +2.02. Critically, value-add is at its highest amongst the lower ability groups. In Cat 4 ability groups in English for example, the low ability group of children achieved a +3.43 Value add score. In 2020 all excepting one student exceeded their CAT 4 predicted score.

The simplest path for a weak school is to limit its intake of EAL and SEND children and provide a restrictive curriculum. Safa Community School does the opposite. The same is true of school like Repton Dubai, which for many years has publicised its inclusive welcome to Emirati children, and, following this, the highly creditable and exceptional results they achieve for children against expectation in the context of Value Add scoring for children for whom English is an additional language, and for whom a level of adaptation is required by Emirati children to the school culture.

All of our finalists this year deserve acclaim, not least for putting their heads above the parapet in highlighting for parents how important value-add is for understanding just how successful a school really is for its children. To give some context to this, a school with a record of high value-add achievement for children can offer parents something very valuable – the promise that, at a given school their child will almost certainly achieve beyond expectation, with all the opportunities that come from this.

We have gone beyond the metrics of value-add this year and looked to value-add in the context of a school’s overall delivery for its children. Value-add in itself can only tell you so much. For example, a school with a restricted curriculum and highly regimented top-down learning in theory could achieve high value-add scoring. But this type of school would not meet our judges view of a successful school for children. Such schools achieve for children in exam results very often at the price of inspiring innovation and creativity. So too, these schools rarely invest meaningfully in a whole child curriculum. Safa Community School sparkles in exactly the opposite way.

Visiting Safa Community School is an extraordinary and life-affirming experience. At this school education is brought to life and learning made an adventure of discovery. Children are inquisitive, engaged, engaging – and happy. They follow their own paths and are supported in doing so. Subject breadth reflects the wishes of children rather than  being imposed. Faculty shine a light on what inspirational, high achieving teaching looks like. The owners care. The school delivers.

It’s hard to put into words just how exceptionally Safa Community School achieves for its children. A very deserving recipient of the SchoolsCompared.com Top Schools Award for Best School for Value Add and Leaving no Child Behind in the UAE 2021 -22, Safa Community School achieved its Award with the unanimous agreement of all our judges.

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Visit the official Safa Community School web site here.

Read our independent SchoolsCompared review of Safa Community School here.

Read the independent WhichSchoolAdvisor review for parents of Safa Community School here.