Teach Middle East Podcast

What Keeps A Principal Rooted For Eleven Years With Richard Drew

• Teach Middle East • Season 6 • Episode 9

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We meet Richard Drew, principal of Jumeira Baccalaureate School, and trace his path from sporty Nottingham kid and clarinettist to long-serving IB headteacher in Dubai. He shares why character, inclusion, and patient culture-building stay at the heart of JBS.

• shifting from football to rugby and the habits sport builds
• why learning an instrument strengthens patience and focus
• choosing a BEd in PE and finding purpose in teaching
• early rugby career, injury and lessons in resilience
• Australia exchange and the haves vs have-nots divide
• UAE PPP years, translators and cultural fluency
• stepping into JBS and leading through change
• IB identity and Character Mark Plus recognition
• Inspire and Aspire inclusion embedded in school life
• staff continuity, community trust and belonging
• philosophy of happiness, health and safety driving learning
• future plans to mentor leaders and give back locally
• life outside school: cycling, cooking and family sport

Teach Middle East Magazine is the premier platform for educators and the entire education sector in the Middle East and beyond. Our vision is to equip educators with the materials and tools they need to function optimally in and out of the classroom. We provide a space for educators to connect and find inspiration, resources, and forums to enhance their teaching techniques, methodologies, and personal development. We connect education suppliers and service providers to the people who make the buying decisions in schools.

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Hosted by Leisa Grace Wilson

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SPEAKER_00:

You are listening to the Teach Middle East podcast. Connecting, developing, and empowering educators.

SPEAKER_01:

Hello everyone, Lisa Grace here from the Teach Middle East podcast. Today I'm speaking with Richard Drew, and he is the principal of the Jamiro Baccalaureate School. And we are actually going to get to know him. So we're all going to learn about him together. Because I've only met Richard just now. And so he's going to tell me about himself and you're going to learn about him. And we're going to learn about his work, his school, and what makes him tick. Welcome to the podcast, Richard.

SPEAKER_02:

Good morning. Thank you very much for inviting me on. It's really a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm glad that you are so open to a conversation that's unscripted. A lot of times when we do these, people are like, oh, please send me the questions. I want to know what I'll be asked. I get nervous, but you are up for it, right?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I might be a bit nervous, but I'm ready to go and I'll try my very best to give you the information that you want about myself.

SPEAKER_01:

Brilliant. I'll start off easy then and ask you to give me the little Richard version. Not little Richard, the one we know, but little Richard, as in growing up. Where did you grow up? Tell us a little bit more about your background.

SPEAKER_02:

So I am from Nottingham, which is in the East Midlands in England. I am the youngest son of a family of four. I have two older brothers and a sister. And we were predominantly state educated. But my sister, who who is number three in the family, won a scholarship to a fairly prestigious private day school in Nottingham called Nottingham Girls High School. And then when Little Richard came along, the my parents thought that that might be a good a good place for me to go. So I went into the boys' high school, which was the kind of sister-brother school across the road. And that that had a real shaping on my life because we're a very sporty family. My father was actually a professional footballer and played for Knotts County, which is the kind of lesser of the two clubs in Nottingham. Many people will know Nottingham Forest, been in the news recently with a change of manager. But my father played for Knotts County in the 50s. So very sporty family. And that changed my direction because it was an independent day school that played rugby and not football. And I was a football fanatic up to the age of 11, but then had to kind of change my game plan a little bit. Went through O levels as they were called then. That now dates me, doesn't it? And then A levels and went on to university to study physical education and teaching. So I went to do a four-year Bachelor of Educations degree in physical education. So yeah, loved being outdoors. Anything sporty was me. We were very fortunate to be introduced to the snow from an early age to our parents, so enjoy skiing and still do. Also, um, surprisingly for some people, picked up a clarinet at the age of 11 and learnt to play the clarinet. So I'm a decent clarinetist and that comes out occasionally. Like to cook because my mother was a was a chef and uh yeah, had a had a really happy, as many people would reflect, family upbringing with very close brothers and sisters. There's only six years between me and my eldest brother. So we we were all very close in age, two years roughly between each of us.

SPEAKER_01:

Brilliant. So you you actually can play an instrument. I wanna I can I want to segue into that. How important is it for young people, for children to get into music and and maybe learning an instrument, especially in these times when everybody's kind of doomed.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, real uh for me it's really, really important because I think it's you can be many things in terms of your your life growing up, you know. Yes, you can have things for me, it was sport, but also you know, learning music and getting involved in music brought a different dimension to who I was, and you know, the kind of the patience and the rigour of practice and and playing in an orchestra as I did in the school orchestra and the school band and and wind quartets and things like that, and gave me an appreciation of of a different side of things. So obviously growing up as a teenager uh in the in the 70s and 80s, listening to the music of the time, you know, the old punk rock era was in in those days, but also having a real appreciation of classical music, you know, and I I actually having played various classical pieces as I went through the grades with my clarinet playing, I still find it really relaxing and soothing to listen to, you know, Maps Art or whatever now. And and I have I have two children of my own, and and my wife and I were very keen for them to play a musical instrument. I always wanted to play the drums, but my mum and dad never did that. So guess what my boys do? They learn to play the drums from a very early age and both still play the drums and play to a very competent level. So no, I think it's really important, but I think just like sports, music, drama, arts and crafts, but and anything that children can be exposed to, I think is really important because it just makes them a much more rounded person, hopefully.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I do agree with you. I'm trying to get my one of my sons, he's quite musical, and I'm trying to get him to play something. So we'll see. Fingers crossed. And then good luck with that. So you actually chose a path of education because you did a B Ed.

SPEAKER_02:

Yes, I did, yeah, the good old B Ed. I suppose I I wanted to be a professional sportsman, but my parents were very committed to us, you know, doing well in school and and getting a university education. And I suppose that always seemed like, you know, being a P teacher always seemed like the next best thing to being involved in sport and being around sport if you couldn't be a professional sports person. And so, yeah, I chose a B ed in physical education, which meant that across the four years of my degree, I was always exposed to in-school practice. So we would do teaching practices every year for a block of time. And I loved working with young people in my area. I I used to get as much pleasure out of helping those children who found sport difficult because it wasn't they weren't naturally gifted or talented in that area or or you know, the health benefits it as much as working with those top performers as well. And during my A-level years and then into my degree, working at things like you know, youth sport games or disabled sports activities that went on in a big city like Nottingham was a real lovely exposure to me to working with young people and get getting the benefits out of seeing them succeed and be happy and be successful or achieve, you know, whatever that meant doesn't necessarily have to win, just achieving a better jump in the long jump or a better time on the track or you know, scoring the goal in football or whatever it may be.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And so sports became such an integral part of your life that it actually took you professional. Tell me about that.

SPEAKER_02:

It did, yeah. So having gone to this independent day school where rugby was the beal and end all and and and then loving the game, I carried on playing for university and then basically was fairly successful at at kind of representative levels, schoolboy level and university level, and then got picked up by Bedford Blues who kind of were interested in me and said if you get a teaching job around here, then you know we'd be interested in signing you on. But you have to remember in the the the game of rugby only turned professional in the early 90s. So when I started in the late 80s, I graduated in 89. It was still an amateur sport, although don't tell anybody, but we were being paid as well. So actually it was a it was a good income earner as well as your lowly teaching salary as an NQT. I was also earning a little bit of money from from playing rugby, which was known as petrol money or boot money. But then the game did turn professional, and and it turned professional during the season when Bedford were in the second tier of rugby, but we got moved into the first tier through a decent season. So had a season playing on and off in the the first tier of English rugby, which is now called the Premiership. And whilst I I was then being paid for playing, I was also still a teacher as well, and it was still very much a uh a professional stroke amateur game in a sense, as it still is today, actually. It's only really the the Premier League players that are fully professional, even the championship players, of which Bedford is still in the championship, kind of on a hybrid contract of some professional money and some private money through jobs that they do. But like lots of rugby players got a pretty bad knee injury, and that kind of finished my playing career at the age of 26, actually. So yeah, it was a short but sweet career which I enjoyed and still have a lot of fun being involved in rugby now. My my two sons are very involved in playing rugby as well.

SPEAKER_01:

So yeah. So you do you follow any team around? Do you follow the England team?

SPEAKER_02:

I I I have a soft spot for for Bedford Blues because I played, but my eldest son has been involved with the Northampton Saints Academy as well. So we very much follow the Saints in in the premiership. And Bedford and the Saints are very well connected. In fact, Bedford are now the Saints kind of junior club, even though it's a championship premiership relationship. So yeah, we follow the Saints, and if we ever get a chance to go back and watch them, we go and watch them. And I said, with my son's involvement, that's been a been a really nice, nice relationship thing going on.

SPEAKER_01:

So then your career as a teacher took you from the United Kingdom to where? Where did you go first, or did you come straight?

SPEAKER_02:

So the my first yeah, my first kind of journey outside of the UK was to Australia. So I I basically got involved with something called the Teaching Exchange Programme in Australia. And I went to Perth, Governor Sterling Senior High School, which was a pretty rough and ready state school. It was quite interesting because it lived next door to a school called Guildford Grammar. And Guildford Grammar is a school where you know the do you remember the actor Heath Ledger, who played various main roles in Hollywood? He was an ex-pupil of Guildford Grammar, and there was a fence that split the two schools. And Guilford Grammar's side of the school, the grass was lush and green, and the Governor Sterling side, it was all dry and burnt, and it was definitely the haves and the have-nots. So I did 18 months in Perth working there, and then came back as part of the exchange programme. I had to come back to my school that I was working at in Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire, and then developed a journey into leadership, became a head of department, then a director of sport, then assistant head and a deputy head, and then a head teacher. And then moved out to the UAE in 2009 to be involved in the PPP project in ADEC, actually, which was still involved with Talem, who I still work for now, but that was the when Talim were in a in a joint partnership with a company called Addison Learning from the UK.

SPEAKER_01:

That's interesting. 2009, I came in 2010 as a part of the PPP with Nord Anglia.

SPEAKER_02:

Nord Anglia, yeah. So we both worked in the same project. Yeah, I was the lead advisor for two schools, one in Banyas and one in Shamka.

SPEAKER_01:

And I was in Al Ain for three schools, one in Jali, one in Mwaji, and one in Zhaka. That's so interesting.

SPEAKER_02:

No, and you know, that experience for me, those two and a half years, because the project, as you know, closed down in 2012. But I learned a huge amount about me as a person, the culture of the UAE, living and working with Emirates, which was fabulous. And I think it stood me in real good stead for me coming into Dubai for the last kind of 10-12 years of my career. But a really wonderful time, and you know, I think the opportunity to see things really move forward and grow and build relationships with not only Emirates but other Arab teachers from the GCC and beyond. Um, now a very fond time, and I'm still in touch with some of those teachers and those guys from that period of time. But I learned a lot about myself actually because it was, as you will know, Lisa, it was very different to what we would have been experiencing in the UK. And you having to think on your feet and do things differently, and also think about the culture of the country and the kind of way in which people were learning at that time.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think when I look back at that time, I think I had a whole lot of fun. A whole lot of fun. At the time, I didn't realize it was fun until it ended. I was like, oh, that was actually quite nice. And there was so much I learned, so much change that I had to witness and be a part of. And it was fabulous. I mean, I then went on to work directly for ADEC for several years. But I think during that PPP time, those initial times when we were just all coming in and everybody was like, what are these people here to do? kind of thing. It was quite a learning curve.

SPEAKER_02:

It's amazing what you have to learn to do. So really fond memories of working with two translators, one in each school. Ahmed Hirsch was a guy from, you know, kind of Beirut, and he basically was my translator. And you know, some really funny moments of having to kind of talk to some grade 12 boys in a pretty stern way about an incident that we were not too happy with. But him having to translate it into Arabic so they could understand, and me saying to him, you know, excuse me, you know, you need to be really, really quite stern when you say this, you know. And and whether he was saying what I was saying, I don't know. But it was definitely a learning curve for sure.

SPEAKER_01:

They say that you you you have to trust the translator. I think my translator was called Saween. So hey Saween, I don't know where you are in the world, but it was it was a very interesting time. So then you moved into leading your current school.

SPEAKER_02:

No, I didn't. There was there was a little bit of a hiatus period. So Tallem and Edison kind of parted ways, and then Tallem asked me to join them as a direct member of staff and moved to Dubai. And so then I basically had a couple of years where I was kind of moved around the company a little bit. So I spent some time at a number of the Tallem schools in Dubai supporting, helping out, and sometimes where there were problems with staffing issues at senior leadership level and just supporting the principals. And then that was how I ended up at JBS actually in 2015. They'd had a newly appointed principal, had only been in post for a short period of time, and sadly he'd taken quite seriously ill. So they asked me to step in to look after the school in his absence, but then it became apparent that he was not going to be well enough to return. And obviously they'd thought I'd done a good job, so then they offered me the job more permanently. And that was 11 years ago, and I'm still here. So yeah, it was a pretty interesting journey at the time, and and stepping into schools and again those lessons learnt from the PPP, having to be able to be flexible and learn the layout of the school, you know, how the parents worked, how the school worked, who the leadership were, and support them as best you could, probably stood me in good stead, actually.

SPEAKER_01:

Eleven years in the same school, Richard.

SPEAKER_02:

Eleven years, yeah. I must be one of the longer serving principals in in Dubai and probably one of the longer serving principals in one school. I'm sure there are others that have done a lot longer. You might know that more than I do. But yeah, I'm certainly the longest serving principal in the TLIM group by some way. And uh yeah, one of the longer serving staff members of Tallem. If you if you count my time with the PPP, it will be 16 years as of December, I think.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So you were there during Ross's time.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, well, even before Ross with Ziad, actually. Dr. Ziad was the first CEO. Um and ironically, Dr. Ziad is still around and he's very much involved with Tallinn from uh uh an ownership management point of view, but he's also a parent of mine. His three boys are at my school. Oh wow. So I see Dr. Ziyad most days, and we sometimes smile and laugh about the the past. Such a great, great guy to to have as a parent and also as a colleague. He's you know a huge amount of knowledge. And then Ross took over from Dr. Ziad, so I worked with Roz for some time and now Alan. So yeah, I'm on my third CEO.

SPEAKER_01:

Tell me what makes it easy for you to stick around that long because it's not easy for many people to stick around.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, that's a really good question, and I think it's a mix of professional and personal. I think stability personally, when you've got a young family, and my my boys were really young when we came here, one and three, and having stability for them to be here and and for them to, you know, go through their education here. My eldest is about to start university actually next week. So he's come through the whole journey. So, yeah, wanting stability and actually really being very fortunate to live and work in Dubai, bringing up a young family safe for your family, for your wife, opportunity, you know, fantastic opportunities. If anybody's listening and they've only been here a short period of time or they don't know Dubai, fantastic opportunity to bring your children up, the you know, the parks, the beaches, all of those things. So that really appealed. But professionally, I think it was always about, you know, JBS when I took over was much smaller than it is now. We've kind of almost doubled in number and we're at capacity, which has been fantastic for the school and for Tallim. But always wanting to, what can we do better next? What can we grow? What can we develop? How can we improve? And having that opportunity to be in one school for that period of time allows you to see that journey through. I mean, I've always thought that school improvement is a little bit like an ocean liner. You know, if you want to turn the ocean liner round, it doesn't turn round, you know, in 30 minutes, it turned around in a few hours because you've got to stop the liner first of all, and and you don't just stop an ocean liner from travelling in one direction, but it takes time for it to stop. Then you've got to maneuver it round, then you've got to bring it back to the point with where you decided you were going to do something, and then you've got to carry on the journey. And and I think that that's something that is a real challenge here in Dubai because the fast-paced nature of the environment and people wanting things to change instantaneously. And I don't think schools and institutions can change instantaneously. I think you've got to build a culture, you've got to build relationships, and you've got to get the right people. You know, that old adage of getting the right people on the right bus in the right seats is really true about institutions. And certainly here in Dubai, that's as true as anywhere else in the world.

SPEAKER_01:

So I think it was a good mix of you personally wanting to stay around, to grow your family, and to grow the institution in which you were made to lead. So tell me about JBS then. What are you excited about that you guys are doing there now that you want to shout about? Shout about it right now.

SPEAKER_02:

I haven't been here for 11 years, I love JBS. I drive into work every morning with a smile on my face. It's a great school in the heart of Jumera. We're an IB school, which we're really proud of. We've got a fantastic community, which is somewhere in the region of about 93 nationalities at the moment. I love the dynamic of local community, our Emirati parents who are so supportive, our French community are so supportive, and then the mix of everybody else. We're really passionate about the character of the school. We're a character education school, one of the first, I think, in the world outside of the UK to gain the Character Mark Plus Award. And a school of good character links in very much with the IB learner profile and what that actually means to be a member of the JBS community. So we're excited about that. We're excited about the continued growth of the school in terms of its provision for extra cricker activities, ECAs, sports, and and also developing young people that are going to go out and be leaders in the world. I think it's really important. We have about 20% of our population are local MRITs, and when you've got that commitment to Dubai and the wider UAE world, it's really important for us to grow those young people and to be the next leaders of the country and getting them off to great universities and being successful in what they do. But I think more importantly, it's a school where people are happy and can belong and can feel that they can grow and develop, and that's from parents to teachers, but more importantly to the students. We're really proud of our inclusion work that we do here at JBS. And we have a program called Inspire and Aspire, which has children in it that have some serious learning needs, but we embody them into the heart of the school, and they are our students, and they wear our uniform and they do all the things that all the rest of our students do with the support of some really talented teachers and power teachers and support staff as well. So, yeah, it's really exciting times for us to continue to grow and develop. And, you know, we're maturing into our skin a little bit. We've kind of gone through the teenage years, and maybe now we're in our early 20s, and we're really settling down and developing things and structures and systems that a growing school needs to have and becomes more challenging as we get more students in the school.

SPEAKER_01:

I love that. I love the fact that you look at it as a child, then a teenager, then a young adult, and now your school is a young adult and it's maturing and it's has its own.

SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01:

I love that. I love that analogy.

SPEAKER_02:

And you know, I think as well as myself, we've got many staff who have been here five, six, seven years. In fact, I'm not the longest serving member of staff. A number of other staff have been here 11, 12 years, you know, which goes to show well you have that mix of new, young, dynamic blood or experienced young blood coming into the school, which always gives you different eyes on your practices and what you're doing. There's also that core of staff who've been here a long time, who know the families, know the students. You know, some of my grade 12s who will be graduating next year have been here since, you know, KG1, KG2, as long as I have. And I've seen them come in as little ones and are now, you know, taller than me and smarter than me, and are hopefully going off to do wonderful things. But I've seen their journey and I've lived it with their families as well, which is fantastic, as have quite a few staff here at JVS now.

SPEAKER_01:

Isn't that just beautiful? Isn't that just the greatest? It is.

SPEAKER_02:

I think I think if you kind of are listening to this and you want to know about my philosophy of education, you know, education and learning is important, but so is is happiness and health and safety. And I genuinely believe that if if people are happy and healthy and are safe, then they will learn. And I think the longer you know those people, know those families, then that that happiness, health part of it, and safety part of it comes more into play. And, you know, there are many families here that I've known for a long time, again, as have many of the staff. And it is like a big family, actually. And when you're an expat and you live away from home, I think your friends and what you do are really important. I think, and in school, you're very lucky because you've kind of almost got an instant family to wrap around you if you allow that and you grow those relationships.

SPEAKER_01:

I really, really love that. You know, it's I think it's every parent's dream that the person who leads the school is someone who is committed to the school for the long haul. I know for me as a parent, that's what my my dream is. I'm lucky though, my kids go to a very good school here in Abu Dhabi, where the principal's been there for a decade. I don't know now if I've given it away, but whatever. Like, so at the end of the day, you want that because you want that leadership to remain consistent. And sometimes things change for different reasons, I get it, but that consistency is to be celebrated. So I'm giving you your props, Richard. Well done for spending. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you so much. Thank you. Now, and your parents ask me, you know, I've heard you're leaving. And sometimes I say, Well, that's news to me, but I'm not. And obviously, there will come a point in my career where it's time to call it a day. But as I sit here and feel at the moment, I feel that JBS will be my last teaching role. You know, it's the school that I will finish teaching at. Whether I go on to do other things outside of teaching afterwards, you never know. But that's how strongly I feel about it. You know, I couldn't see myself at this moment in time sitting here ever going to lead another school, either in the UAE or in another part of the world. It feels like this is where I want to finish and complete. And that has symmetry to it because by the time I am ready to do that, then I will have seen probably those free K students through that. There will be still some of them here. There definitely are still some of them here. I know they are. I will have seen them through from when I started to when they finished, to when I finish. And that that feels like a nice place to be, you know, the symmetry of that.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it is. So then let's project into the future a little bit because I always like to ask this question: what do head teachers do when they stop being head teachers?

SPEAKER_02:

I suppose it depends at what age they are. I mean, I will be working towards the end of my career. What will I do? If I'm not working professionally, which may be in a supportive role of a group of schools, I already have an executive principal role with the group. So I support many of our other schools in certain ways, particularly around leadership and professional development for both staff and students. And then I also have a role with the IB. So I'm the chairman of the UAE IB Association, which was an association that existed and then kind of through COVID and afterwards died of death, and then we resurrected it. So we're fairly new in terms of the resurrection of the association. We had our first conference in February of this year where over 500 teachers are turned up for a whole Saturday, which was wonderful. So I'm busy with that. Whether things like that kind of carry on. But you know what? I'd really love to think that when I do call it a day working professionally and working for a salary, wherever I am, I could give back. And this sounds crazy, but I'd love to go back full circle and I'd love to, you know, maybe be that older gentleman listening to younger children read, or in my sporting capacity, you know, run the undernines boys or girls football team for a primary school for free, just because, you know, that's what I like to do. That's the kind of thing I see myself doing. And also, obviously, hopefully following my boys around a little bit and seeing them play rugby on a Saturday or a Wednesday or whenever it is. So, yeah, those are that that's where I see myself going.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, brilliant. Last question. That was so wholesome. I think I think my listeners know the kinds of things I like to hear. That was just so wholesome. Last question. When you are not in school, Richard, and you're not leading JBS, how are you taking care of you? What are you doing?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, if you're around at about 5:30 in the morning, you'll see me up at El Cudra on my bike with anybody who wants to ride with me. We have a little cycling group here at JBS, but I sometimes think they don't want to ride with the principal on a Saturday morning. So I ride around El Cudra, 50K, 60K, 70k, whatever. It's it's a bit bit more challenging at the minute, hence the early starts because of the weather. Yeah, so I like to cycle because the knees the knees are a bit shocked. So cycling helps. I like to cook. So I've got my mum's kind of interest in cooking. I love cooking. I love cooking just generally during the week, but I love cooking for people to come around and have dinner. And yeah, I love to engage with with my two sons and go and see them play rugby or or other sports that they're involved in. But yeah, hopefully trying to be active. I still manage to ski even though the knees are a bit short once a year. Take a few panodol and get out on the slopes. So the outdoor life is good. So we're waiting for the cooler weather to come in so that we can get down the beach or go out walking or whatever. So those are the things I like to do.

SPEAKER_01:

Brilliant. Thank you so much for being on the podcast with me, Richard. It's been very, very lovely.

SPEAKER_02:

No, no, it's been my pleasure, and thank you for for inviting me. It's been great talking to you.

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