Best On-line School and Home Learning Community in the UAE – The Finalists 2023 – 2024
The following schools have all achieved short-listing for the 2023-2024 SchoolsCompared.com Award for Best Online School and Home Learning Community in the UAE. All the schools listed, in different ways, provide outstanding innovation in online learning approaches and methodology, blending the best of traditional bricks and mortar learning and academic focus with the benefits that come from home schooling and access to a top tier online education.
Each of them, in different ways, endeavours to support added value to each child’s journey to ensure that every student leaves school meeting or exceeding baseline academic and whole child expectations.
Each school has different strengths, and there is a broad array of choices of curriculum, from those offering a pure British education to A Level, to those blending the International Baccalaureate with a US curriculum. Each is a different stages of their journey in bringing a Tier 1 home learning education to the UAE.
Arguably the online sector is showing the most extraordinary growth and potential of any school type in the UAE, this driven in no small part by the positive online and home learning experiences of parents and children during the Covid 19 pandemic, rapid advances in AI – and significant ratcheting up of the quality and breadth of home learning offer.
At least two schools in the following offer a breadth of subject options that exceed that available in any bricks and mortar counterpart. A number of schools continue to build communities in the UAE bringing opportunities to link students and families in ways unimaginable even a few years ago, and resolve one of the concerns historically with online schooling. Worth noting too that another online school, not featured here because it is still on the point of formally launching, is considered top two in the world in its sector, supported by a globally recognised and respected bricks and mortar education brand. Finally, the choice of qualification pathways now includes AP, the IB Diploma, British GCSE and A Levels – and the HSD. Parents and students can now access genuine choice in this sector for the first time – and these are still early days for a sector with ambitions to make choosing an online school as everyday as choosing a bricks and mortar school.
You can read about our criteria for Outstanding Online Education here.
Our Top 5 Finalists
The Top Schools Awards 2023 – 2024
Crimson Global Academy
“Crimson more than lives up to its role as a pioneer in a sector that many believe offers a glimpse into the future of all education and an the increasingly definitive first choice for many families. The greatest gift of an online education is its ability to deliver an education based on ability and where each child is on their journey, rather than forcing students into an educational tunnel that looks only to their age. It’s an approach that is central to Crimson with an impact that removes any possibility, that any child, can, ever, be left behind. Bricks and mortar counterparts cannot do this, or generally refuse to, because switching age-groups in a physical school is nigh on impossible and generally not good for students without their moving school. Once you take the age orthodoxy out of education, the impacts flood in. It opens every door to building a genuinely inclusive education built around the individual needs of each child. Graduating pathways lead from GCSE through to a choice of British gold standard A Levels and its world class US equivalent Advanced Placement and the American HSD. UAE students enjoy small classes that open onto a world of shared experiences with students drawn from a huge international base. Developed relationship with some of the world’s leading employers, and a well established internships programme, are the icing on the cake.”
Crimson Global Academy – review here.
iCademy Middle East
“The only KHDA accredited online school provider, and the most established in the UAE. NEASC accreditation and a pure-play US curriculum education culminates in both High School Diploma and Advanced Placement pathways. The richness of highly developed out-of-school bi-monthly social meet-ups and its blended programmes of study mixing classroom-based learning with online study set the school apart from its less well established international competition, this based around its current role of some 1250 students. Breadth of subject options better those of bricks and mortar counterpart schools by a canyon – it’s breath-taking in its richness and quite extraordinary reach. From Cinema to the Culinary Arts, from Palaeontology to specialist electives in Nursing, iCademy opens windows on to the world and legion opportunities for students to explore their passions and career aspirations. Work expectations are demanding and rigorous, but results pay dividends. For the right students, set on a US education, its pretty much unbeatable.”
iCademy Middle East – review here and here.
King’s InterHigh
“In September 2022, King’s Interhigh became the first and then only school in the world to offer the IB Diploma Programme completely online. Its role in online education from this innovation alone, in breaking down one supposedly unbridgeable advantage of online schooling over its bricks and mortar counterparts, is significant. But it’s not only here that King’s Interhigh sparkles for students. King’s delivers one of the highest impact and most successful British education programmes in the world today with an all-through education stretching through GCSE to gold standard A Levels. Broader subject options including Psychology, a key bridging subject between Mathematics, Science and the Social Sciences, add breadth to the curriculum and Business Studies and a MFL option in Spanish are both popular options in the UAE. Timetabling is excellent – and no obviously linked subjects cannot be studied together. Language options are strong and include Arabic too. What makes this school so extraordinarily successful for students is the simple way that it can map around the needs and lives of each student. It has proved a first option, on that basis, for a number of well known celebrities in the Film, Sport and broader Entertainment sector. The quality of lessons and their delivery is exceptional. Investment in very high quality teachers and ensuring that no second of any live lesson is wasted means that the average return on lessons is significant. Because they are filmed, the resource can be revisited to develop understanding and used as a lifeline in revision. Bricks and mortar schools could learn a lot from this approach and it is interesting, that despite the impacts of Covid on bricks and mortar schools and their rapid deployment of online learning, many of the benefits of recorded lessons that could today have been implemented on the return to school, have fallen by the wayside. A global Summer Camp Programme builds bridges with students from around the world and ECA provision, online and in-person, is outstanding. Add to the mix a scholarships programme, a defined and performing Russell Group University slipstream, VR learning, and the greatest flexibility of study we have seen from any online school to date, and the result is a school that delivers for students and families to an outstanding plus level across-the-board.”
King’s InterHigh – review here and here.
Minerva’s Virtual Academy
“The first school in the world to offer BTEC technical stream online learning – and in a subject area, esports, at the heart of a burgeoning US $4 billion dollar industry, is unable to offer the course to UAE students because of issues surrounding a need for bricks and mortar learning at six week periods. It’s so frustrating as the delivery of British technical stream education is the probably the last of the supposedly unbridgeable limits of an online education compared with bricks and mortar counterparts. It is even more frustrating when it is a subject that is available at only a single school currently in the UAE. Significant credit, this notwithstanding, must go to Minerva, for working through how it can deliver a technical stream education for students – this, after all, one of the stand out features of a British education with a BTEC qualification that in almost every case hubs the International Baccalaureate Career-related Programme. If this issue can be solved – the impacts will be significant, not only on British education, but also that of the IB.
Putting the “so near but so far” issue aside, the offer here is a very strong one for those seeking a British online education through GCSE to gold standard A level. Reach is provided by options in Psychology, Economics and Business, and the ROI is strong with a relatively affordable fee structure that still maintains an outstanding delivery of lessons and self-managed learning. A key innovation is in its delivery through flipped learning, an innovation we are seeing increasingly standard in outstanding bricks and mortar schools. This sees significant learning take place online with lessons then used for debate between students – a proven way to secure learning and create inspirational learning outside the traditional teacher-student model of lesson delivery that has remained pretty much the norm since Victorian times.”
Minerva’s Virtual Academy – review here and here.
Sophia High School
“Co-founded in 2018 by former Headteacher Melissa McBride, Sophia High School provides a British education to students to GCSE (2023 – 2024). GCSE electives include Mandarin Chinese, Global Citizenship, Art, Music, Triple Science and Latin. Subject breadth extends from core subjects in Science (Double), English Language, English Literature and Mathematics to traditional options in History, Geography and Modern Foreign Languages. The school stands out for its integration of VR in its teaching of key subjects and Sophia High School is both CIS accredited and is one of four online schools in the UK working with the government’s Department of Education and regulator Ofsted on the Pilot Online Education Provider Accreditation Scheme (OEAS) for UK online education providers. The school also specialises in teaching younger children with school openings from FS2. Class sizes are capped at six students for English, Mathematics and Science and lessons are delivered daily by UK educated teachers in real time.”
Sophia High School – review here and here.
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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