Top Schools Awards 2021. Results Live. The Varkey Family Awarded The SchoolsCompared.com Special Award for Outstanding Contribution to Education in the UAE.

The SchoolsCompared.com Top Schools Awards 2021-22 Special Award for Outstanding Contribution to Education in the UAE goes to:

The Varkey Family.

The Top Schools Awards has a single award we present to someone that has made the most profound difference to the lives of children and education in the United Arab Emirates. It is presented usually to an extraordinary individual whose impact has been transformational in making our world a better place.

In 2019-20, The Top Schools Award for Outstanding Contribution to Education in the UAE was presented to Dr Abdulla Al Karam, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Director General of the Knowledge and Human Development Authority. We all recognise the extraordinary contribution of Dr Abdulla Al Karam to the lives, and life chances, of children – and to education as a whole in all its myriad of impacts across our schools.

This year, in 2021-22 we are presenting The Top Schools Award for Outstanding Contribution to Education in the UAE not to an individual, or indeed an organisation, but to a family – a family which, working together, through the generations, has absolutely transformed education in the UAE.

Indeed, this is a family whose impacts on the education of children travel beyond the UAE and around the world.

The SchoolsCompared.com Top Schools Award for Outstanding Contribution to Education in the United Arab Emirates is this year presented by Which Media to: The Varkey Family.

Dino Varkey, Chief Executive Officer of GEMS Education and Patron of the Varkey Foundation, accepting The SchoolsCompared Top Schools Award for Outstanding Contribution to Education in the UAE on behalf of the Varkey Family at a presentation held at Our Own English High School in Dubai.

The story of the Varkey Family and its instrumental role in education in the UAE started, of course, in a Dubai school, Our Own English High School. We could not have chosen a more special, or more perfect, place to present the Top Schools Award to Dino Varkey, who accepted the award representing his family.

As Sunny Varkey, the Chairman of GEMS Education, said:

“The Our Own School was the goose that laid the golden egg for us.”

It was in the first incarnation of the school, then in Bastakiya, some fifty three years ago in 1968, that GEMS Our Own English High School was established by the late and quite extraordinary K. S. Varkey and his compassionate hugely principled wife, Mariama Varkey.

Hugely missed, beyond words, today their legacy is continued by their equally extraordinary children, Sunny Varkey and Susan Varkey, their grandchildren, Dino Varkey and Jay Varkey and their great grandchildren.

The founding of Our Own English High School followed just seven years after their move to Dubai from Kerala in 1961, driven by Mariamma’s belief in teaching and education as the world’s most powerful forces for good. The founding of the school and its early years sedimented her links with Dubai’s royal family through her role as teacher, and later friend.

It is worth understanding just how extraordinary this school is in the history of the UAE. This was ten years before, for example, Dubai College was founded. This was a time on the cusp of Dubai discovering oil. Sand was everywhere. The architectural extravagance and innovation around us was but a twinkle in the eye of rulers.

Yet, from extraordinarily humble beginnings, in so many ways, this was the school that set the benchmark and ambition for an organisation, and country, that would go on to transform education in the UAE across every curriculum, in the most life-affirming ways.

From it, in no small part, has blossomed what is today, in the UAE, arguably the best education system anywhere in the world.

And the history of this school mirrors the passing on of that commitment to education through the generations of the Varkey family.

It was in 1980 that Sunny Varkey, her beloved son, helped Madame Varkey build the purpose-built landmark new school for Our Own children in Oud Metha, which had long outgrown the small school needs of its founding role.

It is subsequent generations that have invested in the very latest incarnation of the school in Al Warqa, opened in 2012, to make it the extraordinary school it is for each of you here today.

Let’s not forget that GEMS Education was founded by the Varkey family here, in the UAE. Today GEMS Education, a global giant, is based here, in the UAE.

With Emirates, it is the single best-known organisation from the UAE in the world. Where, however, Emirates flies people around the world, GEMS Education, through its children, transforms the world and pushes the frontiers of knowledge and achievement.

GEMS children are part of a story that is more than the sum of its parts. Every single GEMS child goes on to carry the Varkey family’s legacy into the world, transforming the world, through their  lives for the better.

Today GEMS Education is the largest K-12 education provider in the world with more than 50 GEMS schools educating more than 130,000 children and students each year.

GEMS Education is the Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, Rolls Royce of the UAE.

This is really our company, one, all of us here today in the UAE, can be so proud of.

And it is all possible because of the Varkey family through the generations.

His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai wrote:

“Mariamma Varkey moved to Dubai with her husband in 1959.

Driven by an enduring passion for education, she started tens of schools with thousands of students inside and outside the UAE.

She leaves behind a legacy of education in the UAE and beyond.”

As Sunny Varkey, the Founder and Chairman of GEMS Education responded:

“My mother loved this land, its leaders and people, and considered it her home and second country.

We will continue and live up to her pioneering legacy and embody her firm belief in the power of education to change the lives of generations and make the world a better place.”

This is a family of visionary educationalists with humanitarianism at the heart of what they do. They believe that every child deserves not an ‘okay’, not an average, not a make-do – but, rather, a “great” education. The legacy of this family today runs to the transformation of the lives of a million children around the world.

The legacy too goes beyond schools, not least in the annual GEMS Education Annual Teacher Prize and Mariamma Varkey Award for Inspiring and Distinguished Education. Philanthropy and humanitarianism find a voice through the commitment of Sunny Varkey, and his wife Sherly Varkey, to ‘give away’ half their net worth during their lifetime to worthy causes related to education, as part of their work with the Bill and Melinda Gates 2010 “Giving Pledge” project to transform the world through kindness.

Sunny Varkey writes:

“I have been fortunate that I grew up in a family where charity was ingrained in us from a very early age. We were immigrants to a new country, Dubai.

Even, when my father earned a small amount, a large percentage was shared with the community we lived in, sometimes at the cost of our own comfort.

To this day, our underlying philosophy remains that good giving ‘pinches’, meaning that the sacrifice you make, has to be felt, else, the act remains just another financial transaction in our lives.

“I was also lucky,” he says, “that my parents were school-teachers. They always placed a great emphasis on the value of education. While perhaps I didn’t live up to their expectations as a student, I saw the impact they had on people’s lives. I have always believed that education is key to fixing so many of the world’s greatest problems… It all starts with education.”

We can think of no family more deserving of an award for education and its power, as a force for good, to transform the lives of children.

Our congratulations to The Varkey Family, recipients of The SchoolsCompared.com Top Schools Awards 2021 Award for Outstanding Contribution to Education in the UAE. Our final words go, fittingly, to a student who contacted us as part of this year’s awards:

“GEMS gave me a chance in the world to be someone, to believe in something […,] to make something of my life.

Without them my story would have been so different.

I will never ever forget this.”

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