The Best School for Innovation in the United Arab Emirates 2023 – 2024 Revealed. Top Schools Award Winner. Official.

The Winner

The SchoolsCompared.com Top Schools Awards for

The Best School for Innovation in the United Arab Emirates 2023 – 2024

is awarded to:

Sunmarke School Dubai

Our view of Sunmarke School Dubai

Web: https://www.sunmarke.com

KHDA: Very Good with Outstanding Features

Review: https://whichschooladvisor.com/uae/school-review/sunmarke-school

Review: https://schoolscompared.com/all-through/sunmarke-school-jumeirah-village-triangle/

Sunmarke is, in our view, one of the crown jewels in UAE Education – and an absolutely perfect example of how innovation can be used to engineer outstanding provision for children by ripping up the rule book of the ways that orthodoxy and complacency says things should be done. This is a school designed ground-up by innovation, for innovation, to deliver absolutely everything for the individual child. Sunmarke, in many ways, can be seen as one giant Laboratory of innovation in STEAM, this in the broadest sense of a school that builds a school around everything that makes the life around us – and then makes all the complexity of human life and learning in its many aspect available to children. It is a school built around the innate belief in the tidal wave of curiosity within every child, and allowing that to be freed long before children are pushed into the structures that constrain exploration by imposed knowledge. Education, and the environment for children here, is an absolute tour de force and almost spiritual impact. It hits the gut, the mind, and the heart like a a train released from the need for tracks, guided only by the beauty of the journey and the grasp of a future that you can be part of. Sunmarke school has been hidden under the radar of so many parents for so long. It is time to put that right.

It is fair to say that of all the schools this year with whom we have been in contact, Sunmarke School wowed us all. The ambition, and achievement, is absolutely immense.

Innovation at Sunmarke School is diverse, rich, courageous and research driven. Perhaps that could be a definition for the qualities that an innovative community should possess. The range of Signature Programmes that Sunmarke School offers – from AI to STEAM; from Environmental Studies to Financial Literacy and its mini-MBA programme; from landmark Internships to Think and Thrive gruelling Q&A with global CEOs; from unrivalled ELL programmes to exceptional Careers programmes – all reflect that diversity.

But the question of what it really looks like, speaks to a deeper understanding of what must happen in an organisation to ensure that innovation lives at its core. At Sunmarke School, innovation is systemic. It is not simply that Sunmarke Schools come up with good and novel ideas for education. That would, after all, be fruitless unless the school supported those ideas with leadership commitment, management infrastructure, business processes, tools, training and engagement programmes, performance metrics, incentives, rewards, cultural mechanisms and organisational values to nurture innovation all the way from the first idea to the first school lesson.  Sunmarke does all these things, and more. So the approach here to systemic innovation is also systematic, and this approach both dramatically enhances creative thinking skills, and significantly improves the odds of coming up with radical breakthroughs to engage teaching and learning. The result is to re-define what outstanding can, and will, look like in a school alive with and to possibility and risk.

Sunmarke School innovates not just for innovation’s sake, nor to gain some kind of market advantage over others, but to walk the walk with its students so that they have a first person understanding of what it means to be an innovator, and what it feels like to be part of an innovative process. The school knows that there is no more important skill and disposition that they will need for their future. The world is awash with complacency – and this is arguably the greatest danger we all face around us.

Examples abound. Sunmarke School’s Environment and Sustainability Signature Programme, has been successfully leading Forest School sessions and Environmental and Sustainability studies for the last three years, before it even became currency in many schools. This programme, as so many others that evolve from innovation, is embraced in its ethos and dispersed everywhere in the school through its principles of child-centred learning and empowering holistic three dimensional focus on the whole child.

In keeping with Sunmarke School’s mission statement, “[t]o nurture the next generation of change-makers for a better tomorrow”, the school continuously invests. One powerful example of this investment in contemporary technology can be found in Sunmarke School’s Hydroponics Systems, now intrinsic to the day-to-day life of the school and used by all the students across the spectrum of classes and disciplines.

When Sunmarke School was founded in 2016, it was based on the philosophy of Positive Education, something that has, today, many years after Sunmarke brought the philosophy to the Emirates, now become integrated in the approach of schools across the UAE.  The school uses the metaphor of a flower to represent the founding ethos here. Each petal on the flower represents its focus on the 6 tenets of Positive Education:

• Positive emotions;
• Engagement;
• Relationships;
• Meaning and purpose;
• Accomplishments; and,
• Health.

Today those six points have become seven to include Innovation. From AI to STEAM, from Environmental Studies to Financial Literacy and a mini-MBA, from landmark Internships to Think and Thrive gruelling Q&A with global CEOs, from unrivalled ELL programmes to exceptional Careers programmes, all of its innovative programmes build on all seven drivers:

Sunmarke School’s AI-driven online learning programme helps those students who need further embedding of key knowledge and skills beyond the classroom to ‘close the gap’.

Sunmarke School’s Mini MBA is designed around the discovery that some of its graduate were  challenged by the transition to university lecturing styles. The programme removes this block by  giving students access to UK university professors to help them reset their method of engagement with their lecturers.

Sunmarke School’s ‘Think and Thrive’ programme is designed to give voice to those students bursting with ideas which they believe should be commercialised. The programme provides students with the skills to take their first steps as entrepreneurs.

Sunmarke School’s STEAM Programme and Centre responds to the discovery that children and teachers need to truly integrate their understanding of disparate subject knowledge and skills and bring them to bear on real life problems. In almost every case, the school discovered that the problems students wanted to solve, all ultimately explored ways to make the world a better place for others. Today the Centre is filled to bursting with gifted and inspirational teachers – and students.

Vision: The Future at Sunmarke School Dubai

Over the next 5 years, Fortes Education and Sunmarke School have an extraordinary trajectory.

They are:

“… seeking to recreate an educational paradise, where teachers are encouraged and incentivised to bring the very latest research to bear upon their practice, where leaders feel liberated to find new ways to solve old problems, and where students are taken on a journey of genuine partnership in creating their own futures. These forefronts of innovative revolution may sound straightforward, but decades of research across the globe have shown that that they are as elusive and intractable as they are enticing and inviting.

“Taking a child to a point of self-determination where they co-construct learning genuinely with teachers in a meaningful and sustained ways, across a bespoke curriculum, requires a paradigm shift in children’s (and parents’) inherited understanding of the power gradient of school.

“Reassuring leaders to be bold, in a heavily regulated system, and to embody the spirit of the insta-memes that it is okay and good to ‘fail forward’ requires a courage that will be able to weather many storms.

“And to encourage teachers to return to old problems and see them through new lenses will require professional development that will be the envy of the world.”

Sunmarke School has set itself exactly these quite extraordinary, inspirational, ambitious and hope-filled goals over the next 5 years, this to be achieved through four innovative lenses: understanding needs; leveraging resources; harnessing trends; and, challenging orthodoxies.

Sunmarke School is an absolutely astonishing, quite beautiful, world-beating achievement in Education.

Hold on tight, it’s going to be quite a ride.

[Note: there are number of extraordinarily inspiring videos on Sunmarke which we would have really liked to share, and which we believe deserve a very wide audience, each presented by Ajay Mankani, Co-Founder of Fortes Holdings and Sunmarke School, but which for reasons of confidentiality we cannot currently publish.]

Award Presentation

The Top Schools Award for the Best School for Innovation in the United Arab Emirates 2023 – 2024 will be presented to Sunmarke School Dubai at a special Breakfast Celebration at The Emirates Golf Club on the morning of 16th November 2023. At the event the recipient of The Top Schools Awards 2023 – 2024 for Outstanding Contribution to Education will be revealed.

Historic winners of the Outstanding Contribution to Education in the UAE Award include H.E. Dr. Abdulla Al Karam, Director General of the Knowledge and Human Development Authority, recognised for his era defining leadership of Education in Dubai as a force for good; and the Varkey Family, for their instrumental role in shaping education in the UAE, and ensuring the life chances for generations of children, following the founding of GEMS Education in 1959.

Our Finalists.

Our extraordinary Finalists and those schools which have achieved outstandingly in so many ways for children in the Most Innovative School category follow.  Each of the following schools are recognised for their profound contribution to innovation in UAE Education:

The Arbor School

Web: https://thearborschool.ae

KHDA: Good with Very Good and Outstanding Features

Review: https://whichschooladvisor.com/uae/school–review/the–arbor–school

Review: https://schoolscompared.com/all–through/dubai–all–through/arbor–school–al–furjan/

Bloom World Academy

Web: https://www.bloomworldacademy.ae

KHDA: Awaiting first inspection

Review: https://whichschooladvisor.com/uae/school–review/bloom–world–academy–dubai

Review: https://schoolscompared.com/new–schools–in–uae/bloom–world–academy–al–barsha–south–the–review/

Nord Anglia International School Dubai

Web: https://www.nordangliaeducation.com/nas–dubai

KHDA: Outstanding

Review: https://whichschooladvisor.com/uae/school–review/nord–anglia–international–school–dubai

Review: hhttps://schoolscompared.com/all–through/nord–anglia–international–school–dubai–al–barsha/

The British School Al Khubairat

Web: https://www.britishschool.sch.ae

ADEK: Outstanding / BSO Outstanding

Review: https://whichschooladvisor.com/uae/school-review/british-school-al-khubairat-abu-dhabi

Review: https://schoolscompared.com/curricula/a-levels/the-british-school-al-khubairat-al-mushrif/

A final note.

The Top Schools Awards takes over a year to produce. It engages with parents, students educators and educationalists over countless months, and the work invested in these Awards is the stuff of sleepless nights and deeply felt responsibility. We produce these Awards to celebrate our amazing schools, our magnificent teachers – who are the centre of the universe, our school leaders, whose lives will be judged by their impact on children, and the amazing students that they build a future for. These Awards are only about recognising this – in a world in which our schools and educators have far, far too little recognition. If on exploring these Awards you do one single thing, it should be to reach out to each and every one and thank them for all they do, each and every one of our schools, teachers and school leaders. You have absolutely no idea how much that would mean.

© SchoolsCompared.com. A WhichMedia Group publication. 2023 – 2024. All rights reserved.