Newsletter February 2008

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In This Issue

Current Market Size
4.664 Total number of English-medium international schools (not including future schools)
1,792,817 Total number of students

Changes since January 1st
111 New school records
1,577 Updated (many schools are updated several times per year
974 Checked (no changes)
236 Heads updated (names and/or email addresses)
822 Heads checked
220 Emails changed

New Inspection Bureau for all Dubai Schools

The Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) recently began consultation with schools, parents, employers and representatives from higher education on the development of the Dubai Schools Inspection Bureau - a new organisation that will provide transparent and reliable assessment of education in all Dubai schools. It sums up its mission as: "Assuring quality education for all".

Through a series of meetings at KHDA's Academic City offices last week, representatives from Dubai's diverse spectrum of 230 schools, parents and others were consulted on the criteria, or quality indicators, that inspectors will use when school inspections start in September 2008.

Dr Abdulla Al Karam, said: "The School Inspection Bureau has been established to provide a comprehensive assessment of educational standards and performance for every school in Dubai. With accurate information on the quality of education available, parents can make informed choices based on transparent information on where to educate their children. Furthermore, by highlighting schools' strengths and weaknesses, schools can use their inspection reports to highlight and celebrate what they do well and use the inspectors' recommendations to change and improve further."

There is a varied range of schools operating in Dubai both government and non-government, with many different curricula being studied. This makes Dubai's education environment unique.

The Dubai Schools Inspection Bureau will evaluate how effective all schools are as educational organisations, but will not evaluate individual teachers, principals or students.

Inspections will be made against defined indicators that are evident in high-performing schools across the world, regardless of the curriculum studied or geographical location. These include, for example, progress of students, quality of teaching and the effectiveness of the school's management and leadership.

Attendees at the consultation meetings, held in English and Arabic, warmly welcomed the opportunity to discuss the quality indicators that are relevant for Dubai's schools. Feedback from the discussions will be used to develop draft quality indicators that will be tested in pilot inspections in the spring.

These consultation meetings come just a few days after Dr Abdulla Al Karam, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Director General of KHDA discussed KHDA's visionary approach to creating a world-class and sustainable human development system through collaboration and communication with all stakeholders at the first of many planned events specifically for stakeholders in the education community.

Jameela Al Muhairi, Chief of the Dubai Schools Inspection Bureau, said: "We recognise how internationally, quality assurance and inspection functions play a critical role in the continuous cycle of education improvement. My experience tells me that identifying a school's strong suit, or conversely where there is room to do better, creates pathways to improvement and an overall improvement in quality across the board."

"At the heart of this development is the wellbeing and education of all children in Dubai to help us prepare them for a fulfilling future in the workplace. The Dubai Schools Inspection Bureau is a significant development and we have made a great start in developing the Bureau in collaboration with stakeholders this week. We will continue to work closely with all of the key stakeholders to ensure that the Bureau meets the very specific requirements of Dubai's diverse education system."

The Dubai Schools Inspection Bureau is the first organisation in the UAE solely dedicated to defining and measuring the quality of school education in Dubai. It will also enable parents to make informed choices about education provision for their children.

The Bureau will identify strengths and weaknesses and highlight areas for improvement. Schools will be able to use their inspection reports to highlight and celebrate what they do well and use the inspectors' recommendations to help them devise plans to make changes and improve still further.

KHDA having tapped into the experience of leading educational systems worldwide, is currently developing this customised set of inspection processes, procedures and an appropriate organisation. It will also continuously be consulting with the education community including principals, teachers, parents and owners on the development of the Bureau.


Source: The Knowledge and Human Development Authority

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Country Focus UAE
240 Total number of schools
152,817 Total number of students
12,563 Total number of staff
212 Number of schools offering education for 3-5 year olds
195 Number of schools offering education for 5-11 year olds
162 Number of schools offering education for 11-13 year olds
151 Number of schools offering education for 13-16 year olds
120 Number of schools offering education for 16-18 year olds
122 Number of schools offering all or part UK curriculum
53 Number of schools offering all or part US curriculum
103 Number of schools offering all or part Int'l curriculum

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Sending out a brochure using the new online system

The ISC Research online system is the perfect tool for sending out a glossy brochure without worrying about file size. The system cleverly sends a link to the file (which is stored on our server) rather than sending the file as an attachment. This is an enormous advantage to any company wishing to communicate with the international school market.

Having spent time and money designing and producing a brochure often the only option is to send it by post or attach it to an email. Contacting 100's or even 1000's of schools via a postal campaign is expensive and slow, sending an attachment makes one vulnerable to SPAM filters and to annoyance if the school has a slow internet connection.

Using a link allows the school to download the file when they want to having read an introductory email explaining what it contains. Using the online system from ISC Research reaching the world of international schools is only a few clicks away.

To see how simple the process can be we will follow a short example. The ABC Trading Company is displaying it's products at an event in the UAE. They wish to send out a brochure and email beforehand to all the international schools there. After logging on to the ISC Research system (which can be done even on the move) the person in charge of the stand extracts all international schools in the UAE. This is done using the extensive search capabilities built into the system.

To do it they click on the SEARCH tab at the top of the page, scroll down to the Advanced Options and click on Countries and Regions. This opens a list of all the countries, regions and sub-regions. As they are looking only for one country they find the UAE in the first list and click on the SEARCH button at the bottom of the page.

They now have a list of all the schools in the UAE. At this point they may research and exclude any of the schools When they are happy with their list they scroll to the bottom of the page, give the search a name and then save it.

It is now time to compose their covering email. Moving to the EMAIL tab they fill out some specific details such as the email account the mailing should come from and who should receive any replies. They also give the mail a subject and a save name.

Below these mandatory fields are HTML and TEXT entry boxes. These allow emails to be composed in both formats so that even if a school does not accept HTML messages the mailing will still get through. (To save time there is an option built into the system that allows a text version of the HTML message to be automatically created). Using the special "personalisation" feature each mail may be individually addressed either to the school, or to its head.

Below these are the attachment fields. These allow up to five documents to be linked to the mailing. The documents are uploaded to the ISC Research server and stored there permanently alongside the campaign.

The user now tests his mailing by sending it to himself and then with a simple, final click sends it to their chosen list of schools.

"I am so impressed that the new system can do this - it's great that the file does not appear as an attachment which means it is a great way for us to reach international schools with our catalogue."

Alice Hutt: Classroom Video.

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Latest international school news

International students to flock to UK independent schools  >>more
New European school to be opened in Strasbourg >>more
Singapore to get a new integrated international school >>more
Two new schools to be built in Pueblo >>more
Foreign investors plan international school in Vietnam >>more

 

What are the advantages to being a subscriber?

By subscribing to ISC Research Limited you will gain access to the richest schools market in the world. This market is growing at an extraordinary rate and almost certainly has a greater value than the current UK schools market. Many companies spend a huge amount marketing and selling to UK schools and very little internationally. Yet compared to UK schools, schools abroad are often isolated and have little access to information, representatives, presentations etc. Sales prospects are enormous and they are getting bigger day by day. Using ISC Research Limited's online system subscribers can map, analyse, target and contact over 4,600 English-medium schools worldwide. Taking the current annual growth rate of 11% there will be nearly 6,000 schools by 2010, well over 10,000 schools by 2015 & over 15,000 by 2020.

As well as researching new schools, the underlying database is constantly researched and updated to reflect innumerable changes in basic school information. ISC Research Limited specializes in providing detailed, up-to-date information about existing international schools, emerging international schools and trends in the market.

With the system you can:

Analyse and target schools by geography, curriculum, examinations, membership of associations, pupil age, etc. using Search

Single or multiple user subscriptions are available to suppliers, service organisations and parents.

For free temporary access and system demonstration please contact ISC Research.

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We really like this new service. Cambridge International Examinations has been able to use the ISC Research service as a one-stop shop for targeting and contacting schools. The service is extremely useful: the data is much more comprehensive and up-to-date than anything else and we are able to find new schools as they open.
Peter Monteath,Research & Strategy Manager, University of Cambridge International Examinations

The Council of International Schools (http://www.cois.org/) is delighted, on behalf of its member schools, with this new arrangement with ISC Research, that gives our members access to the substantive data held by ISC on International Schools around the world. CIS is providing ISC with the public domain data it holds on its member schools, while both organisations will feed each other up-dated data, so ensuring that entries are current. CIS will continue to collect compensation data as part of its joint annual survey with ECIS, but this data will remain confidential and will, as in the past, only be made available to member schools who have responded to the survey.
Richard Tangye, Executive Director of CIS

The ISC online service has been brilliant in helping us market our products effectively in each region around the world. It is extremely economical compared to gathering this information for ourselves.
Richard Gaskell, Director International Sales, Scholastic International

ISC Research has enabled me rapidly to develop a marketing strategy for international schools. Targeted marketing in this highly lucrative sector would have been impossible otherwise. I recommend this to anyone seriously interested in this market.
Ian Bourne, Managing Director, Citnexus

The new arrangements give both organisations and member schools access to the vast amount of non-confidential data held by ISC Research about the rapidly growing number of international schools around the world. It would be impossible for us or member schools to do this work ourselves. We look forward to working with ISC Research on appropriate research projects.
Roger Fry, Chair of COBIS
 

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