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The Top Schools Award for Best On-line School and Home Learning Community in the UAE. Top Schools Awards 2023 Nomination and Entry Forms.

Top Schools Awards 2023. Best On-line School in the UAE. Our Award for online schools and home learning communities in the UAE including Dubai and Abu Dhabi

by Jon WestleyJanuary 11, 2023

Below is the official entry form for the Top Schools Award for Best On-line school and home learning community, our award recognising the important contribution made by the growing number of outstanding online schools in the region to increasing numbers of children and families.

The defining feature of an on-line school is the central role played by virtual classrooms, something that became better understood and appreciated during the Covid years when these became the norm for all schools in the region. But, just as in bricks and mortar schools, the best on-line schools build around this virtual classroom a community of learners drawing in fellow students in the region and overseas.

Far from a compromise, proponents of on-line schooling argue that the overall education they offer provide their students with a level of community and networking in which friendships are closer, more powerful – and for life. They argue that the online experience is much better able to to respond to the individual needs of children too. In fact, many argue that truly personalised learning is only possible in online schools. Finally, they argue that the ways that online schools operate means a freeing up of family time with no hours lost to commuting and a timetable that can be built around the needs of family, rather than, as with traditional schools, family playing second fiddle to the more restricted logistics unavoidable in a bricks and mortar school. Children, they argue, can have a life outside school, because they free up time for children to have that life.

Online schools also benefit families in two other key ways. First, fees are almost invariable lower, and significantly lower. That differential can be invested in ECAs, cultural experiences and long-distance family holidays that from this freeing up of income become more easily within reach. Second, many gifted children, those for example whose focus is, say, on training for a particular sport, simply cannot get this time or the required hours needed, to follow this trajectory in a traditional school. Online schools, for many children, are the only option if they are to be able to follow their dreams and meet their full potential. So too, today, online learning is not restricted to a single curriculum. In the UAE on-line schools provide home learning across numerous curricular including British, IB and American curriculum options.

For this award then we are celebrating the most outstanding on-line schools in the region. We celebrate those on-line schools that best meet the needs of children with genuine breadth of subject and qualification pathways; a vibrant and supportive online community; and, learning that inspires and engages children through outstanding, conviction-led teachers and educationalists delivering powerful lessons that build on all the strengths of the virtual classroom.

Given our focus on excellence in STEAM this year, we are also particularly focused on on-line schools that draw subjects together to inspire innovation and creativity in solving problems defined by both students and society more broadly leveraging the discoveries made in each. We are interested in examples of how problem solving is integrated within the curriculum to share knowledge across multiple subjects to build solutions that genuinely mean something to both the students – and the broader body of knowledge and human endeavour to which they naturally contribute.

This will be an on-line school too that sparkles with imagination and ambition in the way it teaches all children, one with a warmth that engenders the passion of teachers and the adoration of children and parents alike. And, finally, it will be a school that ensures that every graduating student can speak with others with knowledge, and passion about a breadth of subjects and interests when they leave school to start the next chapter of their lives, each empowered with the values and confidence to celebrate the different gifts of each of us and make a positive, personal impact in the world before them.

For Schools

The Top Schools Award for Best on-line School and home learning community in the UAE, schools please download the official application form here.

For Parents, Governors, Teachers and Students

Parents, teachers and students – we want to hear from you! If you believe that your school offers an amazing on-line education – and one which has made a profoundly positive and inspirational impact on its children, please contact us with your answer to the following. “I would like to nominate X school [name of school] as the best on-line school and home learning community in the UAE because …. ” Please email us at [email protected]. You can write as little or as much as you wish, and please include photographs if possible. Please give do your best to bring to life for us the impact the school’s teachers and on-line culture and community has had on you and/or children in your email.

The Top Schools Awards 2023-24

Top Schools Awards 2023 The STEAM Years

This year, the Top Schools Awards are celebrating outstanding achievement in our schools with a particular focus on how schools inspire children by linking all subject areas to bring the extraordinary wonders of the Arts, creativity, imagination – and freedom to experiment and innovate, into all areas of the curriculum including, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

We believe, passionately, that the Arts are absolutely fundamental to delivering an outstanding education for every child, one focused on the whole child and the gifts all children have to change the world for the better and make the difference – every day, and in the future. The Arts bring STEM to life.

Rocket Girl – the Arts and Sciences, together, brought to life

Photograph of young female student and aspiring engineer at The British School Al Khubairat in Abu Dhabi. The photograph shows her testing a Jet pack specially developed for the Top Schools Awards to showcase the importance of STEAM in education. This Award visual is for the Best On-line school and Home Learning Community in the UAE In November 2023, members of the TSA Space and Rocket programme completed first phase testing of the Imagination^TMpowered Jet Pack specially manufactured for this year’s STEAM focused Awards. We visited a number of the region’s most outstanding schools. We are particularly grateful for the assistance of the extraordinary and accredited Rocket Pilot, Space Girl and aspiring young engineer Tilda from the outstanding The British School Al Khubairat in Abu Dhabi(pictured) for her considerable, and quite, totally, awesome, bravery and kindness in completing rocket pack inaugural flight testing.