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The Top Schools Award for Best School in the UAE for Children of Determination. Top Schools Awards 2023 Nomination and Entry Forms.

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The Top Schools Award for Best School in the UAE for Children of Determination. Top Schools Awards 2023 Nomination and Entry Forms.

Nomination form for the Top Schools Award for Best School fotr Children of Determination and SEND in the UAE 2023 - 2024. Here we see a young girl from Safa Community School in Dubai aspiring to be an engineer as she tests a Jet Pack designed for the Top Schools Awards to showcase the power and importance of STEAM in education.

by Jon WestleyJanuary 9, 2023

Below is the official entry form for the Top Schools Award for Best Mainstream School for Children of Determination in the United Arab Emirates 2023-24, our award recognising schools offering the most outstanding education for children who are differently gifted.

The UAE is unflinching in its steadfast commitment to people of determination, but its belief that we need to start recognising and focusing on the gifts of children of determination, many of which put many of our own gifts look decidedly uninspiring, is probably the most powerful. Across education, the most outstanding schools focus on the strengths and gifts of individual children, all children, rather than defining children by their weaknesses, or struggles, in different subjects or parts of their lives. After all, what kind of world would it be if we wrote our CVs filled with our weaknesses rather than strengths? Arguably it would be a totally upside-down way of living our lives – so why on earth should we be celebrating the strengths of some children and not others? We clearly shouldn’t.

This Award then is for those schools that both welcome children of determination, do so with clarity and integrity – and then go on to celebrate their gifts and provide them with an education every single bit as outstanding as that provided to every one of its children. These are schools that celebrate difference through a positive, empowering and celebratory lens that understands difference as the engine of everything important. It is what makes us human. To not celebrate difference is to cut everyone of us off from some part of ourselves. Worse, it is not difficult to trace almost every conceivable human failure in history – and contemporaneously, with discrimination. That it still exists in any form in society represents an absolute failure of ambition and our humanity – and if it exists in schools that play such a centrifugal role in shaping our future, and the future of our children, the costs are still higher and the possibility of a better world starkly recedes. The stakes could not be higher.

This does not mean of course that every school can meet the different gifts of every child. Some schools are stronger in Science than the Performing Arts, for example. There is no “best” school for every child.

In this Award we celebrate schools then that welcome children of determination and then structure an outstanding education around them, without discrimination. These are schools that walk the walk and are not remotely interested in tick boxes. These are schools that will be able to evidence their welcome statistically, but more importantly have stories to tell that showcase the positive impact that children and students of determination have on school life and other children as well as stories of great individual and determined achievement across any number areas of school life from the Sciences and Arts, to Sport and the Performing Arts. We celebrate in this Award those schools that are proud of their children – all their children, achieve for all children equally powerfully and have a demonstrable commitment to opening their doors to difference rather than slamming them shut.

Given our focus on excellence in STEAM this year, we are particularly focused on 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 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.

For this Award then, we are looking for schools that want to celebrate the achievements of every child. We are looking for schools that celebrate difference as the gateway to to a more profound, bigger picture delivery of a whole child education that leaves young men and women leaving school with a holistic education built on their individual needs, ambitions and gifts, and one celebrating the many ways we all live our lives beyond books.

This will be a school 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 School in the UAE for Children of Determination 2023-24 – schools please download the official application form here.

For Parents, Governors, Teachers and Students

Parents, teachers, governors and students – we want to hear from you! If you believe that your school offers an amazing education for children of determination – 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 Blended school in the UAE for Children of Determination 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 investment in teaching children of determination 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

Best School for Children of Determination and SEND in the UAE. Top Schools Awards 2023.

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 Lottie from Safa Community School in Dubai(pictured) for her considerable, and quite, totally, awesome, bravery and kindness in completing rocket pack inaugural flight testing.

Without her, and those many other children we visited across the UAE, none of this would have been possible. They made us… believe.