Teach Middle East Podcast
Welcome to the Teach Middle East Podcast, the ultimate audio hub where educators find inspiration, share innovative ideas, and grow together! Brought to you by Moftah Publishing—the minds behind the premier Teach Middle East Magazine—this podcast is your gateway to the latest research-based practices, cutting-edge classroom strategies, and the heartwarming stories of educators from the Middle East and around the globe.
As the only podcast that interviews school leaders from across the Middle East and beyond, we offer unparalleled insights into the challenges and successes that shape educational landscapes in diverse settings. Join us as we dive deep into the fascinating world of education, where every episode promises a treasure trove of insights designed to connect, develop, and empower the brilliant minds shaping our future. Whether you’re seeking fresh perspectives, practical tips, or a dose of inspiration, the Teach Middle East Podcast is your must-listen resource. Tune in and transform the way you teach!
Teach Middle East Podcast
Inside One of Saudi Arabia's Most Progressive Schools with Dr Steffen Sommer
In this podcast episode, we talk with Dr. Steffen Sommer, Director General of Misk Schools in Saudi Arabia, about his journey from working in the automotive industry to leading in education in the Middle East.
He shares his experience with Misk Schools, a project initiated by the Saudi Crown Prince to combine international educational standards with Saudi cultural values. Dr. Sommer discusses his career shift, the role of multilingual education, and the strategies used to prepare Saudi students for global engagement.
We also look into the development of what makes Misk Schools unique and the Crown Prince's vision for the school's role in Saudi Arabia's development. This institution aims to support Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 by providing high-quality education. We discuss the importance of investing in education and the decisions that help shape future leaders and innovators.
Finally, Dr. Sommer discusses combining traditional Saudi teaching methods with international expertise. He highlights the efforts to train a new generation of educators and the importance of adaptable leadership in a culturally diverse environment. This episode is for anyone interested in educational innovation and leadership, particularly in the Middle East's evolving educational landscape.
Connect with Dr Steffen Sommer here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steffen-sommer-1568b816/
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Hosted by Leisa Grace Wilson
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Hi everyone, this is Lisa Grace, welcoming you back to another episode of the Teach Middle East podcast. Today I am honoured to have Dr Stefan Sommer on the podcast with me. He is the Director General of MISC Schools over there in Saudi Arabia. He is a very experienced educational leader and a thought leader in the space, and so today we're going to pick his brains a little bit. First we're going to try and get to know him a little better and then we're going to try and see if we can glean from his wisdom today in education and learning what he thinks about the whole space, the sector.
Speaker 2:You are listening to the Teach Middle East podcast connecting, developing and empowering educators.
Speaker 1:Welcome, Dr Sona.
Speaker 3:Thank you very much, Grace, for the flattering introduction. Thank you so much Thanks.
Speaker 1:No, it's well deserved. I am very much aware of the fact that we only have 30 minutes and I really want to get as much of your richness as I can, so I'm going to jump in and just ask you where did it all begin, your career?
Speaker 3:Well, I started my career in the early 90s, actually after university, to begin with in business. I started my career at Peugeot in France. I very quickly was promoted to the position of logistics manager for the Eastern European market. So I spent a few years there, was quite successful there. But my wife couldn't really settle in France. So she said well, why don't we go into teaching? And I didn't even have a teaching qualification at the time. So I applied for one job at rugby school because I knew it from history, and so I applied and I got the job as a language teacher and in my first year I did the PGCE. So that's how it started. So I was a housemaster at rugby, stayed there for 10 years the longest time really I stayed anywhere since I've been in education and it all started from there.
Speaker 3:Then I became a deputy head at Sutton Ballin School, a large boarding school outside London. Then my first headship was at the British School in the Netherlands, in Holland, in the Hague. My second headship as the headmaster of the British School of Paris, and from there I went to lead Collège Champité in Switzerland, one of the largest boarding schools in Switzerland bilingual French and English, because there we ran a UK and British program leading to A-level and a Swiss maturity program that was done in French, and from there I moved to Doha College and now I'm here at Miss Schools in Saudi Arabia, the, the first and only school which is a national school quite a special one, but it's a national school really which was founded by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and we only bar five students, we only have Saudis here, and that's a very, although we run an international program. It's a very different way of doing things, but it's. I'm really enjoying it much.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. We're going to talk a lot about some of the things you're doing at MISC schools a little bit later, but I want to go a little bit back. You spoke of being in France, being in Switzerland, and then I remember reading somewhere that you speak up to six languages. Am I right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, I speak more than six languages, but I speak six languages very fluently. Yes, fantastic. I was born and raised in Russia, so that's one of my languages. My dad is German, that's another language, my mother's Czech. That's another language, and I picked up a few on the way as well, because I lived in all those countries. We learned French when I was in Russia and I spent a lot of time in France when I worked for Peugeot, but then, of course, as I've just said, later on became the headmaster of the British school. I spent a fair number of years there, and then my role in Switzerland was also in the French-speaking part, in Romandie, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. So that was more French, but I also speak Spanish. I speak Italian, so I do speak Chinese because that's my main degree, but I also speak Arabic. My Arabic is, my understanding is very good, speaking not so good, but good enough to make sure that I can do all the things I need to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, brilliant. I love languages. I studied quite a few myself and I'm actually quite worried now with young people's resistance to learning modern foreign languages. Just out of curiosity, why do you think that is?
Speaker 3:Well, I don't think we have more resistance nowadays than we had in any other year. The language learning landscape has changed completely Now, if we just not look at the UK, but if we just look at, for instance, in Europe. Language learning has a different status, because Europe is now a united space and there are many, many more young people who speak many, many more of all European languages or different European languages than ever before, and that's to do with experience. That's because they are exposed to all of that all the time they're traveling without borders, and all that Now in Britain. Of course, that's always been a bit different.
Speaker 3:Language learning in Britain was never a big thing because English is the lingua franca of the world, and I suppose the motivation wasn't really there. Although I have to say, as a linguist myself, some of the finest linguists I've ever met in the world tended to be British. While there are not very many around, those who are around tend to be very, very good indeed, and the courses that are available at university are also very, very, very good by all international standards. But it's not such a big thing in the UK, which is understandable, it being the lingua franca. Also, language learning is done differently nowadays Students don't learn so very much systemically anymore, so it's more like everything learning by doing so. You pick up from songs, you pick up from holidays and that kind of thing, and you then expand on that. That in the olden days was not so much the case. You learned a language really from start, from the very beginning, in a very systemic way, with grammar, with structure, and that is now longer the case anymore. Young people know the power of AI, that actually I can type something, no, actually I can say something on my phone and it will say it back to somebody else in whatever language I choose, and that has also made language learning. It's given a different status.
Speaker 3:But we mustn't forget I'm not one of those who poo-poos those things, although I'm a linguist. But we mustn't forget I'm not one of those who poo-poos those things, although I'm a linguist. I don't, because I know from many young people that I've worked with that they have a different way of learning languages and that is one of them. Even by using apps, for instance, they are picking up these things and use them quite confidently, and that is another thing.
Speaker 3:Confidence in speaking languages has increased phenomenally, although maybe the competency level when it comes to the accuracy of the language. That is not as good as it used to be in learners, but certainly the students are much more confident and are therefore much more easily able to say something on a subject that they want to talk about. Most, of course, it's general living stuff and that kind of thing. It's not necessarily academically very high level things. Butses, for instance, and even A-levels have never really been meant to be, to be that kind of thing. They're not degree holding language qualifications, but I don't really agree with the fact that students don't learn language but they learn them differently.
Speaker 1:That's. That's eye-opening, and I think I'm also thinking back to my time when I taught languages. So I did study linguistics at school, at university, and I taught languages.
Speaker 3:I thought so from hearing how you pronounced my name.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you so what bothered me then was the fact that we had real resistance in England, that is, to students learning modern foreign languages, because they really did think the lingua franca English was sufficient, and many did go on to learn oh, actually a language is beneficial, but they didn't. Anyway, we digress. Tell me what led you to the Middle East.
Speaker 3:Well, I've always sort of had a liking of the Middle East. There's always been my ambition to, if possible, to work in a school in the Middle East. The opportunity didn't really come round so it wasn't. You know, when I really moved around from one headship to the next, I was always headhunted from where I was into a new place and I've always been very keen on being in the Middle East. And because I'm also the vice chair of COBIS, I've always taken a very keen interest in what's happening in the Middle East because I have always seen it as a potential area where a lot of innovation could be happening very quickly. Because, you know, there's a lot of agility with finance. There is the very strong will to move up the international ladder in everything in science, technology, in education, technology in education, in whatever very fast and normally when you have historically, when you've looked at nations like that before I mean the US was one of those, once one of those nations, and they climbed up very quickly in a historical context. So I've always thought that the Middle East could be one of those nations and in the days when Dubai first started becoming a bigger place I'm old enough to remember when it wasn't, but I remember very distinctly when Dubai became a place to be spoken about.
Speaker 3:I could see that a lot of things were happening there in schools that you couldn't easily observe in others, in well-established systems, because there is a downside of well-established systems that we have in the West and that is that we are in a rut. It's always worked, and why can't we just fiddle a little bit with it and make it work better, Although you know, we know from research that actually a big overhaul can be done in order to make it work perfectly. But you know, why should we, when it's perfectly all right as it is you? Because all of that is finance, all of cost. You know any big change costs a lot of taxpayers, money and therefore people are innocent. And so that's, and I I've always liked particularly you're spearheaded by dubai I've liked the klutziness of them that in the middle east they were so keen on on making it to the top of the ladder very quickly that you know anything went, and they were quite happy to try very innovative, very disruptive models of doing things very quickly.
Speaker 3:And I and considering the culture which is quite conservative in the middle east, I've always found that, yeah, interest of mine, but it's. I've never really had an opportunity until 2014-15, but I joined doha college to really go there. But but it came. You know, it just came almost naturally to me because when I was in Switzerland and Doha College came up, I was approached and I also had a very keen interest. So the two things matched very quickly and the rest is history.
Speaker 1:Brilliant your time at Doha College. What's one word that you'd use to describe it?
Speaker 3:I think that was my, at the time, most revolutionary time, because I left Dewar College having doubled its numbers, having given it a brand new campus which is now one of the finest in the world, having organized the finance for it, restructured it completely, and I would like to think that with my team there, the school had become one of the top schools, certainly in the Middle East but even beyond.
Speaker 3:And we've done many, many innovative things from the academy, high performance learning, and you know the way we structured the school for students to go through the primary all the way to the upper sixth form, knowing that it was almost guaranteed that they would do well. Systems were so tight and so well arranged and I was proud because the systems were good and yet the children were happy. It was a very happy school. So, yeah, I enjoyed my time at Dover College and the new school, the new campus, had been planned for 12 years before I arrived there and actually people had given up, thinking that it would ever happen. And then all of a sudden, once we'd made the right moves and finance could be arranged and we got a loan and all these kind of things, it then went very quickly. So, yeah, I was very proud when I left Doha College. I thought well, I'm leaving that school in a very, very good space.
Speaker 1:And then you made your journey to Saudi Arabia. What has that been like?
Speaker 3:Well, it's been. Doha College was a very good preparation for it, because when I arrived here and this is just to give you a bit of context it's the Crown Prince's School. It is literally a school that is unparalleled in the world, because we have a new campus too, which was one third done by the time I arrived here, which was very difficult for me to take over a campus that was not even half done, and it's about double the size of the campus in Doha College. That was 100,000 square meters. This is well in excess of 200,000 square meters. It is 10 buildings, it is a sports spine. It was an Olympic swimming pool, olympic diving pool, olympic sports halls, basketball courts with riding facilities, go-karting facilities, e-sports facilities and golf and golfing facilities. It is quite extraordinary what we've got here. So I've got an Olympic gymnastics hall. So it's actually now that the campus is finished, and it was quite difficult to begin with because I hadn't quite realised that when this campus comes into fruition, it be more than a school, because we are also an olympic training center and that for looking at where saudi stands and what the vision for 2030, which was done seven years ago and we have another seven years to go.
Speaker 3:This school sets educational standards and I see myself very much as a physical representation of the vision for 2030. It has three main pillars, but the vision and one of the pillars is the human capital piece, which really is called ambitious nation, and I see schools as the backbone of creating that ambitious nation, because not only are we, we are quite the lead school I'll say a bit more about that in a second. We are a highly selective school. We are the school for the future leaders of Saudi, in Saudi, and that is not necessarily the political leaders, but it would be leaders of companies, leaders of organizations, leaders in the spirit of Saudi internationally, the WHO and all those various, all those various organizations. And, as such, we're also set up as an innovative, as an innovative school, and we are and I can tell you a few more things about it and everything I do here and I've spent enough time in the middle east to be well and all of these things to make these things available to Saudi government schools so that the entire education system can be uplifted by the work that we do here. We are exceptionally generously funded by the Crown, for which we are exceptionally grateful. We have a Broadway-style theatre. We've got lecture halls here.
Speaker 3:As, say, I'm the vice chair of cobus. I know hundreds of schools around the world. I've never even known that there could be a school like this. It is more like a university campus, but it is a beacon school in many ways. But we're also a statement, don't forget, and by being a statement and I've had many, many visitors since we opened last summer.
Speaker 3:I opened the school on the 20th of August and we've had many visits since, from members of government, leaders of governments to educationalists, leaders of organizations, who were just stunned by what this is. And I always said to them this is also a statement. It's a political statement that, in the vision of 2030, we don't just say how important it is that we do the utmost for the education of our young people. And Saudi has a very young population. You know, 60% of the population are under the age of 30. Any nation in Europe would bite your right arm off. So therefore, the potential is huge.
Speaker 3:But Saudi are saying look, we are putting our money where our mouth is. That's what we've been saying and that's what we're doing and that will stun quite a lot of people in the West where education spending. If we take Britain, as a case in point, has been going down since Tony Blair left office, and that was quite a while ago now. That's why schools are crumbling, standards are going down, teachers are striking because the housing conditions are so bad. That cannot be good for the future of education, which is actually the future of your country. While Saudi is saying this is look, we do mean, we don't just say it. And if you look around the business, there's not only Saudi. I've just spent almost 10 years in Qatar. That's the same here. If you look at Qatar Foundation, if you look at some of the Qatari schools, they are. They're still performance-wise, not quite where they should be, but it won't be long because it's you know. They are investing very, very heavily and it will have an effect. That goes without saying.
Speaker 1:Yes, it will, and I've seen already. Having been in this region since 2010 and having worked in the reform in Abu Dhabi, I've already seen the changes that are coming afoot as a result of the investment not only in human capital, but in technology, etc.
Speaker 3:Talk to me about the innovation that you are doing at MISC schools as it relates to the curriculum okay now, in the first instance, we are running an international curriculum and we have chosen and that's really, at the moment, the best there's, really all our students are Arabic speakers, all our students and a they're all Saudis the entrance requirements, because we are found, we were found at the entrance requirements. So if you look at the schools and you wonder what it is, when you look at the big public schools in the UK Eton College, harrow, rugby, cheltenham, winchester, godolphin all of these schools, they all were royal foundations at the time, stunning places at the time when they were founded, and many of them were founded for the poor and for the general population. We know nowadays they are now very expensive schools, but that is more or less what we are. We are that kind of a place. We are founded a bit like Eton as the elite school of the country, but in the 21st century with everything that is, with all the technology, all of it as much as imaginable, and we're very proud of it. But broadly, that's the context, because when Eton first started off it was a school completely off scale that nobody thought well, how can a school be looking like this in those days? And that's exactly what the schools are like, and there's's, of course, as a deed you know, british education that's highly demand internationally because of what these famous schools have done over the centuries and with it the universities that they send their children to, ie the oxford's, cambridge and the russell group universities and so forth. But that is more or less what is now being created here in this country, it being in the 21st century where you know there is plenty of money around, which of course is generated through the oil. But of course in those days when it was Britain, there shouldn't be a surprise that boarding schools and the big public schools sort of popped up like mushrooms at the time of the empire, when people were dispersed all over and boarding schools were needed. So that's how it all happened. So this is now the same year now. So we are quite elite school, but we were found under the proviso that we should be a beacon for what's happening in the country.
Speaker 3:So I've always, from the minute I came here, seen that if we're doing it correctly, we could have an immense impact on what's happening in education in Saudi in the next few years. That's why many of the talks I've recently been given around the network here in the Middle East mainly at guests, but also here at EdInvest, here in Saudi, edinvest in Dubai and these kind of things, showing off the campus and telling things about it but also sort of saying what impact this will have. Often I link it directly to the vision for 2030, to which we really belong. Now, if we just go back to our vision and the mission that we've been given by the Crown Prince is that by 2030, we ought to be one of the top 10. And that's quite a mission. If you think about it. We're doing exceptionally well, but and we've got very, very able students I mean the majority of the students I've got here at Miss Schools and they're all Saudis. Most of them, as I've just said, would fit into the top 10 to 15 percent of what was Doha College ability-wise, and Doha College did exceptionally well. So we are well set for that.
Speaker 3:But there are several challenges. One challenge is that we're new, although we've got everything imaginable. One of my talks at EdInvest the other day I said to investors don't kid yourselves, a glitzy campus will not make a top school. The top school is about the people and what you do to your students. But of course, since a top school, with all this razzmatazz can offer a myriad of opportunities and, as we know from research into the most able students, that it is the myriad of opportunities that creates that additional intelligence that is needed in order to perform well at the end of the day. Of course, we're well set up for that, but of course it all depends on how you use it and how you put it into practice.
Speaker 3:So the first thing that we did is design a diploma. So we've got our own diploma, which is the Miss Schools diploma, and very much in keeping with what universities want, and particularly the universities in the US, in the UK, but also in Canada and Australia. And that is, yes, academic results are very good and they are a very important qualifier. They are a very important benchmark, very important currency. But they're only one thing, because we know from research that the students with the best results at A-level are not necessarily students who do best at university. And there are reasons for that, because we've been talking about 21st century skills for quite a while. So that seems to be a bit of an old hat, but it isn't so much, because there are several things that need to be had before we reach our diploma. Only one of the quadrants out of four quadrants is academic results, and that we're doing IGCSE, we're doing IA level with the Cambridge suite, but that could, over time, that could change into something else for APs or something like that, depending on what the demand is.
Speaker 3:So that's very, very flexible, which is one of the reasons why we didn't opt for the IB, because the IB would not allow us to be the school that the founder, the Crown Prince, wants us to be, because when you do the IB, you become an IB World School and that's it. You are the IB World School, you're special, you are the IB World School, and that's not me saying anything bad about the IB, but the IB is the IB. That is what it is and everybody knows what it is, and that has a huge advantage. But our founder did not want us to be a school like any other and therefore it was almost ruled out because we would, by definition, be a school like many others, in fact, 2400, to be exact, around the world. So we opted for for a level and igcse, because it creates an air flexibility that could actually be changed. You know, some a level subjects could be in one year and others not, for instance.
Speaker 3:You can change as you want, you can add, you can add in you want, you can add in pre-U, you can add in further maths, you can add in BTEC, you can add anything in. But we also do Saudi qualifications Well, saudi qualifications like the Tashkili in Qudarat, which is comparable to SATs in the US. So because the students, because they are Saudis, while they're going through international programme, it's important that they're at least qualified to enter Saudi universities, because we're here to uplift Saudi education. So I wouldn't mind them going to Saudi universities because they will certainly give it a good push up. But there are procedures to follow and TASKILI, for instance, which is like SATs, is just one of those basic requirements that every Saudi student needs to have in order to get into university here, whatever else you have. So we're doing that as well.
Speaker 3:The second quadrant is a leadership, and don't forget, the founder of the Caribbean has founded us to be the go-to school for leadership. And there's another piece of innovation there, and that piece of innovation is that we have deconstructed the Charter Institute of Management Leadership course and juxtaposed, identified, extracted from it the essential skills that it teaches, and then juxtaposed those with activity that train, shape and instill those skills and those activities are being used in the teaching of every single subject, so we've woven that into the curriculum in such a way you learn maths, you learn English, you learn Arabic, islamic studies. You learn all of that using, amongst other things, those activities and that will indirectly, without necessarily the students in kindergarten knowing that they are learning leadership behaviours. It does, and the reason why we came up with that is because we defined leadership as not only a skill. Leadership is also an academic discipline which has an evolution, because top leaders in the 60s had to have different skills from top leaders in the third decade. We know that Leaders used to be much more autocratic in the last century, while they're much more diplomatic and much more inclusive and cooperative in the 21st century. And that is the way it is. So it is an academic discipline which evolves and therefore needs to be understanding, and what we learn now about leadership will have to be overhauled in a few years' time, because in 20 years' time there will again be other demands on leaders from what they're now, because that's an academic discipline.
Speaker 3:But most importantly, thirdly, leadership is a behavior type, and that is the crux, which is why we have woven those leadership activities into the entire curriculum and all academic subjects, because behaviours, as we know from literature, can't just be learnt, they have to be practised on a regular basis. It is almost like when you move into a new house and the first night you wake up in the morning because you need to go to the toilet. You stumble over a chair, you run into a door because unless you put on light, you don't know. But once you've done that, about 50 or 20 times, you could even find your keys without even looking where you're going, because you know exactly where you can find your way around. And that's how behaviors work and that's why we're teaching it within the curriculum from very early on, without the students necessarily realizing. But of course we're also doing leadership outreach courses. There are boot camps, there's a duke of edinburgh now there's outbound, you know, outdoor pursuit and also all kinds of activities. We have a head boys, head girls and all that kind of thing. So there's our leadership opportunities as well to practice it.
Speaker 3:The third quadrant of the diploma is the national identity and that is really national history as well, because, don't forget, we want to create leaders that are steeped into the history, into Saudism, that they are Saudi leaders, not just any odd leaders, and that really means that they need to be well-versed in Arabic, and not only Arabic as a language, but Arabic as a literature and as a background, because I see Saudi and that's hailed by many not only as a defender of the faith, but also as a defender of the language, particularly on the Arabian Peninsula. Dubai certainly isn't, and Abu Dhabi isn't because there's so many foreigners which is understandable given their context that actually the Arabists are really quite fearful because Arabic, even for the Emiratis, is at risk, because even they can't speak it properly anymore because they're so much better versed in English because they're surrounded by it all the time. Now that, of course, is not happening here, because we've got 60 million Saudis and they all speak Arabic, and so we want the nation, we want Saudi also to be seen as defender of the language, and therefore it is very important that anybody who comes from schools as a top leader is well versed in everything that defines Saudi and that is Arabic. And the fourth quadrant is an internship, and the internship is not a work experience. It actually is a qualification that we do where the students' entrepreneurship, as well as the Vision 2030, the Saudis need most Saudis. If you ask the young people. They're generally quite well-educated, but they want to be safe. They want to work for the government because they know they get their salary every month and they get a good pension, but it's not really in their gene pool that well.
Speaker 3:You know, I want to open my own business, I want to be innovative, I want to move things on. However, in order to have a sustainable economy in the future, you need that kind of intellect. You need that kind of people who think of new things and are gutsy and are happy to invest the money they have and open a company. And since that's not there, we are still in in entrepreneurship skills very early on within our CCAP program, but we then also make it compulsory for all students to do an internship, and they can either do it in grade nine or they can do it in grade 12, which you know in the, in the English system, would be year 10 or year 12. So either in grade 11 or in grade 9 they can do the internship, and I have a number of companies lined up there that the students choose. The company doesn't choose the student, but the students choose the company and they have to do a project in the company. And that is mainly because I want the companies to see value in what the students do there and that it's really they either have to critique or praise a product, a structure or the company as a whole in really quite an academic way and they write a thesis about it and they get an epq and extended project qualification for it, which is actually.
Speaker 3:I now get companies that are tapping on the phone on the shoulder when I fly from dubai to riyadh and say, well, aren't you that guy from from this schools we would quite like to join, as it happened when I last was in dubai for a conference. We want to join your internship program. So that adds another skill to the students of something that in Saudi particularly is, but across the Middle East actually here is very badly needed. So that's one of the innovative things that that we do here. We are also high performance learning school. There's quite a number there's about 90 of us in the world but we do it quite differently because we have chosen this leadership piece. I've just been talking about defining leadership as sort of leadership of self, others and leadership of one's own expertise into the high performance learning program.
Speaker 3:Secondly, we have propped it up with a very intensive piece on critical thinking. We have woven into it safeguarding. That's another thing that we do very innovatively, because here in Saudi safeguarding is not such a thing, but we've become the beacon for safeguarding. We do safeguarding actually in the same way as in the UK, in many ways like the best schools in the UK. So everything is safeguarded here All the students, all the staff, everybody. Here. We have safeguarding training on a regular basis. We have a very close relationship with the Safeguarding Alliance. We are spearheading things in safeguarding and sports because we've got the Olympic Sports Centre here and we're also, of course, training Olympians or future Olympians in the country. We're coming here to be trained and then, of course, can apply for scholarships to join these schools, to become students here when we might be successful in the future and be international. Often the ones that we're training here would either be at least local, sometimes regional, often also international swimmers, basketball players, gymnasts, that kind of thing, and some of them will over time be able to join these schools on the basis of a scholarship.
Speaker 3:I haven't said that before, but I compare this, of course, to schools like the big public schools in the UK. Just in the 21st century, we do, of course, have a scholarship program, very generous one. So 20% of all students that we have here can be scholars. So I do have a big scholarship pot. Those who pay fees yes, the fees are high. For Saudi they're high, very comparable to sort of top schools in Dubai, but for Saudi our fees are very high. But, as I say, many of our students aren't scholarships scholarships and they're very, very able students, and scholarship means they pay nothing, not even uniform, not even a trip. They pay nothing, and that allows that diversity.
Speaker 3:Coming back to how, for instance, the Rugby's of this world started, you know, for the poor people of rugby, that was how it initially started. And now, of course, they are all fee-paying schools, but they all have scholarships and they're scholarships for that reason, because they still need to do what their founders once said and our founder, being the crown prince at the moment, did say 20% will definitely be scholars. And I don't have to go through a very long-winded process to ask for more, for more scholars. If there are more scholars that would qualify and I do have space I could even do that. That wouldn't be too much of a problem. So there's a, there's a real philanthropy. That really about us as well. So we were talking about innovation here.
Speaker 3:There are other things as well. We are, of course, in saudi saudiization is a big thing which is very difficult to do here because many of my teachers have to be expat teachers. We want to quite a number of brits, but also south af, you know, from all the English-speaking countries and so forth. But I do take in up to 10 top, top students, saudi students from Saudi universities, in addition to my headcount every year in order to train them for one year in our very own teacher training academy which we have here attached to the school. We use that academy to train our new teachers in high-performance learning, in critical thinking, in IGCSE and A-level yes, that as well in assessment.
Speaker 3:But those Saudi teachers, for instance we teach them as well in transferable skills.
Speaker 3:That's not a thing in Saudi schools, that is known.
Speaker 3:So anyone who's gone through school in Saudi wouldn't know what a transferable skill is and how to learn this, but so we teach them that as well.
Speaker 3:So with the intention that after this year of being trained with us, they will get an IPGCE and they get QTS as well from Warwick University who we've partnered with. So actually this is a real upskilling of the Saudis, because they're not only then qualified to teach here at this school, they can teach at any school here in Saudi, in a local school as well as international school, or they could go to the US or to the UK or to Canada or wherever and teach. So this is a real upskilling for them. So we're doing that as well, which is another very innovative piece which is highly regarded by the Ministry of Education, so much so that the structure of our teacher training academy, which we've put in place, is now being emulated by the National Institute for the Professional Development of Teachers, which is new, hadn't existed here before. So they're more or less emulating it on how we structure our academy here. So these are all innovative pieces that we've been doing here.
Speaker 1:Some really groundbreaking stuff. I was just soaking it all in and thinking when am I going to make a trip over to see? By all means, by all means, come anytime. It is definitely going to be on my agenda pretty soon. I would love to one see the campus and then also to see all the different programs that you've just outlined at work in real time as a leader in the space. Let's talk to fellow education leaders now. What do you think are some of the more vital skills that school leaders need to have in this era, and why do you think those skills are vital?
Speaker 3:Well, I think in this day and age, particularly in the Middle East, you need to be forward looking, innovative, flexible. You need to be forward-looking, innovative, flexible, very understanding of the linguistic culture but also the behavioral and customs culture of the Middle Eastern countries, and I think you have to be adaptable, because what you've planned yesterday might not just happen in exactly that way next day. So the ability to have a very clear vision where you're going, to make sure that everybody is on that bus that you have put out, that carries the vision, to make sure you're all going in the same direction but, at the same time, enabling the people to do what they need to do and allow them to do what they need to do, but hold them accountable. As you know, I've led Doha College and many other schools in Europe. Accountability comes natural to Westerners because that's what we do from very early on, that we have to be accountable for what we do. That doesn't come so naturally to Middle Easterners. Not so much because, you mustn't forget, these are all monarchies and they're not monarchies like the UK. These are absolute monarchies and there's a hierarchy and a very strict hierarchy. So there's a bit of a nervousness about making a decision and to be the ultimate person to be accountable. Sense of accountability needs to be there by the leader, because the leader would be expected to train the troops on that, on how to do that, take responsibility and not shy away from being challenged. That takes me to the next, uh, to the next poem.
Speaker 3:Um, there has to be confidence confidence in oneself, confidence in one's own decisions. Uh, nobody will want to make any rash decisions and decisions have to be well thought through. But when I say confidence in decision-making, I'm saying that, yes, I wouldn't ever want to make a decision or want to stick to a decision because I've made it. I don't want to stick to a decision because it's still valid. Therefore, you need to have the confidence of potentially changing a decision, because the development here, saudi, is on a bullet train. A bullet train is going very fast and it's going at phenomenal speed. So it is perfectly possible and it doesn't mean you are a bad leader that you're making a decision today. That might actually be wrong, because if you're going that way, you could crash the whole thing. So you'd have to be confident enough to say well, actually, let's just change tack here, and that will always be understood, because people are moving quite fast here and I've discovered that schools stagnate because people don't make decisions, because they're fearful that the decision might be wrong tomorrow, which actually happens more and more often. But if you don't make a decision, you are resigning to the fact that you will, of course, stagnate because you will just turn around in circles. But I've mentioned patience already and patience is quite important because the countries here in the Middle East run at a different pace and yet the expectation is to be very fast.
Speaker 3:And you know, I don't know if many of the people listening to the podcast will speak Arabic. It's almost the structure of the language is like that, because the tense of Arabic are very differently structured from any other language that I know and therefore there's a bit of a living in the past. There's always a reference to the past which goes back to the religion, back to Muhammad and all that, which is great. But as a Westernist, you have to live with that and understand that actually, that different concept of time and how, how long things will take, has to be understood and taken on board and accepted, because we're not going to change it. But at the same time, there's always this pressure that things need to be done quickly. So there, for me, it is a very natural that everything needs to be done by yesterday. It just is. It is that kind of thing. It comes from this notion that really we don't really accept anything as real until it has happened. So what we're doing now is not really there, it's only there once it's been had, and that is a time delay that in the West we don't have, but here. That is part of living. So therefore it's almost natural if we then put pressure on people. So, oh yeah, can you do that quickly? This is urgent. Most of the things I do on a daily basis are urgent. They all come in the form of urgency. Nothing ever is given to me that I've got time for. I can think about it for a longer period of time. So that's the skill that we need to have.
Speaker 3:It's sort of a bit of a I mentioned thinking on your feet but you do need to be quite speedy, quite speedy in sort of assimilating information and making sense of it in the context of what's happening. It is the most exhilarating place, I think, in both Qatar and particularly Saudi, to be working in, because the sheer amount of change that you experience and can influence here as a head is unfathomable in the West. If you look at the timescale, the metro in Qatar was built from the first spade into the ground until it was built took a year and a half. Can you imagine 35 train stations underground to be built in a year and a half in London? I mean, this would take a decade at least to do that. So it's, you know, once decisions are made, they're made and we get on with it and do it quickly, which is admirable. But it comes with other problems that you just need and all the things that I've just described that you need to have here in the Middle East. Come with that, come with that speed and that ambition, that really, really admirable ambition.
Speaker 3:But countries have not. When they started out with their, their visions have not come from a space where you are in england or where you are in germany or where you are in spain, it's they're quite a way back. So therefore, the catch-up has to be very fast and they've done it. They've done it well. One could criticize a lot of things, but we can do the same in the west, you know. You know everything that we can look at, we can criticize that could have done this way.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's true, and I'm sure mistakes have been made, but if you just look at the countries in the gulf, it's it's quite formidable what's been achieved. I mean, when I arrived in qatar in 2015, most of it just looked yellow. It was just. It was just, and by the time the world was there, it was well. It looked like switzerland. It was unbelievable. So it's a it's kind of things can be turned around very, and that's another thing that, as a Westerner, I find it's really quite exhilarating. I never knew, in fact, I never thought it was possible for so much to be achieved in such a short set of time. Yeah, brilliant.
Speaker 1:We are coming to the end of the podcast, dr Salma, but I've got to ask you about you, because leading such a project like you are with MISC schools and all the other very important positions that you've held, I want to talk about you for a second. How do you ensure your own well-being? How do you take care of you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's. I mean all school leaders really need to do that. For me, well-being is about balancing what you have to do and what you like to do, and I'm not saying that's common in most people, I do. I get the non-fund of buzz out of the job. I do so. In all those years while I've been in education I've never really looked at my job as a job. I've always looked at it as a way of being, as a way of living. I've roped my family into that when we went boarding schools and when it was a 24-hour day anyway. And even now, I don't mind, I start much earlier than I have to start and I finish much later than I have to finish. I stayed here all summer, for instance, to finish this campus. I mean, nobody asked me to do that. I did because, well, in order to get going, in order to make sure that we get on the ladder here, to move quickly to the vision, I better make sure all of that gets finished and it so there needs to be. I get some of my well-being from that, not all of it. I mean I do get tired as well, because I've I've just taken a holiday at the beginning of the year in the first week of january. We had a school holiday in the second week of january anyway, because obviously you do run out of steam after. But I don't feel myself that I easily run out of steam because I, yes, the job's stressful, it always has been but it's what I call positive stress, which also gives you a lot of. It emits quite a lot of endorphins which other people only get when they do things. They, you know, when they do things that they love doing. But I've organized my day like that.
Speaker 3:I'm a very keen sportsman. I'm very sporty. I do fitness and other sporty things every day for at least two hours and I do it in the morning. I get up very early in the morning and I do sports. I do sport before I start my work because that's the only time I own.
Speaker 3:In the evenings I'm often out and about with at functions or entertaining people or being entertained, doing things for copers. I'm also on outstanding schools, on the board. I do other things, and so the evenings are often not mine. So I do that in the morning. I'm a chess player, I do clubs, I do publications, I'm an avid reader, a member of the International Bazaar Society, famous French author of the 19th century. So it's you know I do a lot of other things as well that I enjoy doing, but I balance my life by making sure my job, which takes a lot of time, is part of my life, rather than there's life and there's the job. I've never lived like that. I've always seen it as this is part of my part of my being, which defines me yeah, I think.
Speaker 1:I think what you've managed to get is work-life harmony, so you don't have that separation. You've allowed them both to flow harmoniously into each other, and that's commendable.
Speaker 3:But I just think it's very important that we all find our own ways. I mean, I know that is not the case for everyone. In a job like this, um, in the world of education, where um children only have one shot, you know at education and it needs to work. You can't just say, oh well, let's reload and try again. It's, it needs to work. I take it very seriously indeed. I take the relationship with the parents very seriously indeed. I take the training of the staff, the relationship with the staff, very seriously indeed. So I think I think very early, when I first became a head, I just thought, well, I either make it part of life, or it simply won't work, or it will simply not be good enough at the end of the day, what I do. But I've enjoyed it. I've enjoyed it very much and I've never regretted it. Brilliant.
Speaker 1:It has been absolutely enlightening. What a delight, thank you, thank you very much.
Speaker 3:Not at all. Thank you, ace. Thank you so much. Thank you, thanks. Bye-bye.
