Best Primary School – The Finalists 2023 – 2024
The following schools are our Finalists for the 2023 – 2024 SchoolsCompared.com Best Primary School Award for their academic and whole child education of children in the UAE.
All the schools listed, in different ways, provide outstanding breadth of academic, technical and ECA options for students to ensure that every child can meet his or her individual ambitions, potential, and ability.
Each of them endeavours to provide added value to each child’s journey to ensure that every student leaves Primary school meeting or exceeding baseline academic and whole child expectations. Each school endeavours to protect the magic of Early Years childhood whilst delivering the strongest foundations for moving forward in their educational journeys.
When we have looked at schools, we have weighted those that plough back investment into facilities, teacher salaries, resources and school improvements year-on-year to improve education for children.
All of the schools shortlisted endeavour to deliver a benchmark for the best Primary education for children available in the UAE.
Finally, we have looked across all areas of provision, investment, innovation and achievement that support each school being shortlisted.
Bottom line is that primary education in the UAE is astonishingly good. At its most outstanding there is none better anywhere in the world. This is one of the most difficult categories in our awards to resolve the pull of alternatively outstanding schools, such is the quality here, and abundance of it. Parents are absolutely spoiled for choice. To reach the Top 5 in this category is a quite extraordinary achievement. You can read about how we evaluate Outstanding Primary provision here.
Our Top 5 Finalists
The Top Schools Awards 2023 – 2024
GEMS Jumeirah Primary School
“This is GEMS Education’s flagship British Primary – and it really shows. Established in 1996 with just 30 students, this was GEMS’ first UK curriculum school. More than a quarter of a century later, little wonder that when you ask parents for the best Primary Schools in Dubai, you wont find a list without JPS. It’s not about the accolades which come thick and fast, including BSO and KHDA “Outstanding School” status. Nor is it about the history, or the buildings. In this school it is about, instead, that rarest of all combination of outstanding leadership, outstanding teachers, phenomenal structures of learning and looking after each child, an absolutely beautiful inclusiveness with very mighty engines to respond, GEMS investment – and the impact of adoring parents and students. Year, after year, after year, these blend to create nothing less than absolute perfection. If you were to try and design the perfect Primary, this would be it. Without being too controversial, this is also a school that empowers its female faculty and particularly leadership. They shine a light on what outstanding leadership looks like and throws out the window any remaining notions that men somehow have the monopoly on outstanding leadership. Longstanding School Principal Rachel Higgins is of a calibre that she could lead any school, anywhere in the world, and achieve the extraordinary for children. Move beyond this and, admittedly, the scale is massive. When you conjure up the image of a perfect primary, most of us think about a small, intimate school. With around 1500 little ones, this is not that image. However… somehow, inexplicably, when you visit the school you don’t know. The way it works in practice is like lots of those imaginary intimate perfect primary’s: you never feel that you are in a big school, or that your little one is going to get lost. In fact, you feel that your little one is the absolute centre of the universe. And the reason you feel that…. is because they are. GEMS Jumeirah Primary School deserves every accolade it receives – and many more.”
GEMS Jumeirah Primary School – review here, and here
Horizon English School
“This is a school we know so well. We have lived and breathed its journey in countless discussions with parents, teachers and school leadership over more years than we can almost count. It is a school that has been consistently adored by its parents, and little ones, since the very beginning. It appears on the radar of every young family looking for a Primary school who lands in Dubai. It’s also a school that gets inundated with pleas by parents at the school, to create a Horizon English Secondary. No one wants to leave. The children never want to be dispersed and taken away from their friends. This is a forever school, or parents would invariably like it to be. Yes, the school today has new slipstream schools, all outstanding. But they are not Horizon English. There is a single reason why this schools sparkles above all others. This is a happy school for children. Everything, absolutely everything, is built around this. Leaders come and go, owners come and go, but you do not change this. You start with the happiness of each individual child, and you build the school, brick by brick, around this each year. If this is the secret to this most loved Primary, delivering it… actually making it happen, is no small task. This is a school where teachers and leadership and owners, have to put themselves last and children first. There is no room for egos. So what you end up with is a school filled to the brim with true teachers, true educationalists whose only care is the children under their care. It’s worth saying that new owners Cognita recognise just how special this school is beyond the sea of Outstandings you’ll find in the inspection reports. It is to their considerable credit that they are investing beyond significantly in a school, leadership, teaching faculty, parental body and little ones that deserve every bit of the love being festooned on them.”
Horizon English School – review here, and here
Kings’ School Dubai
“Probably the only school in Dubai that has never not been judged Outstanding, this absolutely beautiful Primary celebrates its twentieth anniversary next year. Over the last two decade’s its success has seen the launch of two outstanding Kings’ all-through schools in Nad Al Sheba and Al Barsha and it’s quite impossible to imagine UAE education without Kings’. Inevitably in providing a summary, you cannot capture every piece of the jigsaw, but it is fair to say that for many parents, the reputation is one of very high academic achievement and child progress combined with a phenomenal commitment to Sport. There is truth in both – and perhaps that is the secret of how Kings’ both achieves extraordinarily for its little ones, but also earns the adoration, and respect, of families and peer schools. The links between Sport and Academic achievement are well rehearsed, and probably one of the defining features of what founds so many UK based public schools. On that note, of all the schools here, you could argue this is the most rigorously British, something that is supported by its predominantly UK intake. It’s perhaps not so well known that, historically, many parents setting their sights on a DC education, saw Kings’ as part of the jigsaw in giving their little ones every chance to be accepted. Historically it seemed to work too, although the two Kings’ schools these days capture the hearts of the majority of graduating little ones and their families. It’s certainly one phenomenal Primary, and on its own terms, and more importantly for the children it is made for, and assuming there is such a thing, it’s beyond perfect. If there isn’t such a thing as perfect, this school just made it.”
Kings’ School Dubai – review here, and here
Repton Abu Dhabi – Rose Campus
“As we write this, Repton Abu Dhabi, and its beautiful Rose Campus, has learned of its recognition by BSO (British Schools Overseas) as an across-the-board “Outstanding School.” Of course, we knew that. But it is a reminder that Repton in the UAE extends much further than the fairy tale campus of Repton Dubai and its arches and turrets. In Abu Dhabi, Repton reinvents itself as a giant of future looking modernity with its eyes on technology and the future, its architecture closely matching its ambitions to deliver the future of education in the UAE for its students. If that is the dynamic of Repton School Abu Dhabi as a whole, the Rose Campus lives perhaps a little more in alignment with its naming. Not perhaps quite the rose gardens of England’s perfect Summertime, but the sense of a school confident in itself and its capacity to begin the journey of inspiring its little ones that they can create a grand future for themselves – and others. Academically selective, in so far as any school for our littlest ones can be, this is nevertheless an internationally deeply inclusive school – something that has always been a defining strength of Repton in all its UAE schools. EAL is a formidable strength. The focus is traditional – the three Rs, but with technology made equally important in the mix. Arabic too is given the importance it deserves – you have to start young to have any chance of making its delivery a success for older children and it’s a USP that every student who is educated in the UAE should be taking with them into their lives ahead wherever they travel in the world. For a school that carries the responsibility of ensuring its little ones are ready for the many challenges of a Repton education before them at its sister slipstream Fry Campus there is a powerful recognition that this is an age too where play is centrifugal to childhood and learning. This is a happy school, not a hothouse. Far from it. If it does stand stand-out from its peers, it is in the trajectory and structure. Whilst Rose Campus is strictly not a Primary School, we have considered the school in the context of the journey students make to Year 6 to reach our picture here, a journey that is distinctive and unified, and resolutely Primary, if divided by location and naming.”
Repton Abu Dhabi – Rose Campus – review here and here
Victory Heights Primary School
“Multi-award winning, it seems that Victory Heights has been in the Emirates forever, despite being the younger child on the block compared to the majority of its outstanding peers. This is another school that we have grown up with, almost since it was just an idea drawn in the sand of its location in Sports City. We say “location”, but it is better described as the “beating heart” of Sports City and its surrounding areas, such is its impact and community reach. This is another school that has been crafted, where it matters, not from bricks and mortar, but, rather, from its quite extraordinary leadership and teachers, collectively an extraordinary engine of child inspiration and learning. Every teacher here is a conviction educationalist – and experiencing a VHPS lesson is something you can never forget, such is the impact and “magic.” In truth, even as an adult, you are drawn in to the point of forgetting your age and thinking wistfully “if only I could go back in time.” This is a school where every child is known by name, and personality – and cared for on those terms. It’s a school where each child has the confidence to question everything and love learning for its own sake, not because it is imposed. It’s a school where, behind the scenes, the pedagogy is complex, structured, extremely clever and unique, but it’s a school where you do not even know it is present, such is the skill of faculty. Progress and attainment is off the scale here, and you name the school, it’s likely that it would welcome a VHPS child with open arms on graduation. If there is a single way of capturing what is achieved here it is this. VHPS children have a childhood here. When they graduate, they are ready for the world. Each child leaves the school both wise and enormously accomplished, but also little and still a child in all the millions of ways that matter. They still believe that anything and everything is possible. They still believe that goodness will always prevail. They still believe that they can, and will make a difference in the world. They still believe in all the wonders of reading and the worlds it opens up to them. And yes…. maybe they do still believe that fairies live behind a tiny door in every garden, but they also know that that this is a secret of being little and one day they shall have to say good bye.”
Victory Heights Primary School – review here and here
Return to contents page: click here.
NEXT Page: Best Early Childhood Centre and Nursery School Finalists revealed
Wow.. Congrats to all winners. In my opinion, American Gulf School in Sharjah is also suitable to be in the first top American schools. https://www.ags.ae/en