UAE's Best Schools announced. Top Schools Awards 2023 Finalists Revealed. Sport, Music, Academics, STEAM, Innovation, Happiness and much more.

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UAE’s Best Schools announced. Top Schools Awards 2023 Finalists Revealed. Sport, Music, Academics, STEAM, Innovation, Happiness and much more.

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The History of the United Arab Emirates’ Top Schools Awards

The Top Schools Awards recognise the regions most outstanding schools – and those which have made the biggest impact with parents, students, experts and our readers over the year. These are schools which have scored exceptionally on our visits and/or through EDSTATICA – and those schools that have achieved exceptionally, where applicable, with government school inspectorates. These are the schools and educators which you have told us have transformed the life chances of your children in delivering most to their potential, ambitions, talents and capacity to make a difference in the world. These too are the schools and educators which we believe deserve recognition and celebration – and who have absolutely humbled us by their beyond-outstanding achievement. In almost every case, schools and educators highlighted here are setting benchmarks in what they achieve – these translating into an education sector that evolves and flourishes to each year better meet the needs, potential and aspirations of students and parents. We believe that there is nowhere in the world with a better educational system or breadth of outstanding opportunities for students – and we believe that the innovation in our sector is leading the world.

So how did it all begin?

Top School Awards recognising the best schools in Dubai Abu Dhabi and the UAE

2017 was the year we first announced our Top Schools Awards. The awards made an immediate impact, picked up not just by schools and parents, but also media across the United Arab Emirates. Today the Top Schools Awards have become the definitive tool used by parents as part of their shortlisting schools for their children and for recognising and celebrating the schools and educators that have made the difference for their children. You can learn about the first Top Schools Awards in 2017-2018 here.

Over the years since, the Top Schools Awards have become a history book of all that is outstanding in UAE education and draw a map charting the extraordinary speed of change we see each year as new schools launch across the region and our schools and educators set ever higher benchmarks for what parents and students can expect from our world class schools and the education they provide our children. You can read about the 2019-2020 Awards here and the 2021- 2022 Awards here.

Top Schools Awards Dubai Abu Dhabi UAE November 2021

This year, The Top Schools Awards 2023 – 2024 marks our sixth year of delivering the UAE’s definitive awards in education.

Why did we believe that we should invest in the Awards? As editors working in the education sector, we come across schools, ideas, leaders and practices that deserve recognition.

Too often however, they do not get it. It is very easy to take anything in this world for granted, but in the case of teachers and schools it seemed to us something was awry. We felt that our schools and educators should be celebrated – and to the rooftops.

Of course, educationalists, in general, do not need or seek praise in order to do what they do so well – they are conviction-led. Teaching and educating children is a vocation, and a passion. These amazing and beautiful human beings do what they do for children because they have a gift and want to play a part in changing the world for the better through the human beings that need us, and matter most – children.

But we believe that just because teachers are the great unsung heroes and heroines of our world that do not seek acclaim for all they do, this does not mean that they should not be recognised. In fact, we believe that celebrating them, and showcasing the best in UAE education within the schools they make sparkle, helps society become a better place for all of us. They shine a light on the best that we can all become. It is only right that we recognise some of the finest schools and educators in the world.

As a result the Awards for 2023 -2024 are the most wide-ranging ever undertaken, covering every aspect of a child’s educational journey from joining a school to their graduation. The Top School Awards in 2023 – 2024 cover every aspect of education across 31 Awards providing parents with the most comprehensive guide to the best in education across the board ever produced in the UAE.

And this year we are celebrating girls and young women – and all the wonders of STEAM.

The focus on STEAM and Girls and Young Women in Education is a highlight of the Top Schools Awards 2023 – 2024. Here we see a young girl ready to fly to the limits of the imagination wearing a Jet Pack specially engineered for the Awards and our UAE-wide tour of schools and The Festival of Schools to inspire children in the wonders of STEAM.

This is what we believe that you can take from the publication of our finalists and detailing of the very best performing schools and educators in the UAE:

First, all of the schools featured in each of the following Awards, we believe, have something very special to offer the right child. In one or more ways each of them offers something exceptional and innovative. We believe that every school featured here lights the imagination – and reaches for the stars.

Second, evident in all our schools is a fundamental care for children, a rejection of a blind focus purely on exam statistics and a recognition of the whole child. The focus of all our schools in each category is to see the child as an individual with his or her own gifts, potential, ambition and needs. In subject area awards this means schools will have gone above and beyond to help each child be the very best that they can be. This is equally the case in those academically selective schools we have featured in the following.

Third, you can expect some surprises here too: in key ways a number of the schools featured here re-write the rule book on many of the assumptions that have underpinned education in the Emirates for many years. This is, not least, because of the genuinely extraordinary transformation of education here in recent years, and it must be said that both ADEK and the KHDA, in particular, have played an instrumental role in this story. The quality of school inspections now undertaken by regulators, and particularly following innovations in reporting on child well being and inclusion, now lead the world. There are many, many schools in the UAE, particularly in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, which today compete on the world stage for the outstanding, powerhouse education they provide for our children.

Finally, whilst no single school will ever be perfect for every child, the Top School Awards 2023 – 2024 has been designed to enable you, as parents, to draw up a shortlist of schools to visit. We have tried, in each of our Categories of Awards, to ensure that we offer parents choice between schools that meet the very different needs of different children. For example, you may well find represented in our Awards an outstanding academically selective school. But so too, you will find represented an equally outstanding and steadfastly inclusive alternative. We are all different as adults. That is no less true of children.

You can read our Guide to the questions you should ask, when visiting schools, to really understand how well their fit will be for your children, here.

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