Welcome to The Repton Family of Schools Virtual Media Roundtable! This engaging forum brought together three educators to discuss pivotal topics shaping the school experience and offering a holistic perspective on educational advancement.
Join us as we look closer at this collaborative space, attended by Education UAE, with the first topic, led by Gillian Hammond, the Chief Education Officer of Excella and Principal at Repton School Dubai, on the subject of sustainability in education.
Gillian Hammond: This is a topic that I feel passionately about. We often have very ambitious targets for ourselves, and sustainability is one of them. It’s one that we’ve started to discuss with the authorities too, which, via their DSIB inspections, are starting to inspect us on sustainability and want to see what evidence we’ve got to show that we’re educating our children on this. So, it’s a very important topic for schools. And the question that we often get asked by other local schools is how do you educate students on this? What are you guys doing?
Firstly, the ‘how’ – we would highly recommend schools set up an eco-committee, comprising students, staff, and parents. You need staff members who are really excited by sustainability in the school and who’ve got a bit of knowledge themselves. We then did an audit of our school to see how sustainable we already were, and what more we could do, and we’ve used two different platforms to do that. We investigated the eco-school seven-step programme, and we also had a look at the Green School Award, which we’re aiming to achieve 75% of next academic year.
Having completed our audit, we’ve now developed an action plan with some key measurements in there, and what we decided to do was in line with the UAE’s own goals – we would like to have 30% clean power in the future. The UAE is aiming for 2050, and if we could run our three schools with 30% clean power, I think we’d be very, very proud. It would then mean that we would be contributing to maintaining that 1.5° temperature rise globally, which I think is crucially important.
Steve Lupton (Principal at Repton Abu Dhabi): We’re very fortunate to have many of our families and staff living on Reem Island, close to school. The vast majority of our students and staff walk to school or use scooters or bikes, which is great to see.
Gillian Hammond: We put in bike racks in each of our three campuses to encourage that too. I’m glad you mentioned the staff because we do have a rule regarding the distance that our staff can cover. We don’t want them to have to travel too far, so we have a radius of how far away they should live from the school to try to reduce that.
We are considering and looking into green roofs too, as it’s another way for us to help reduce our carbon footprints and to become net zero. We have flat roofs on all our campuses where we can do that and we would love to explore more solar panels. Another project that the students are doing is generating power from the fitness suite because they’re all in there on the treadmills, on the rowing machines, and on the bikes. And you can hook these up to generators that will produce power, and that is what we’re looking to do during the next academic year.
Education UAE: Gillian, do you get other schools or organisations asking your students or committee to talk to them and share their initiatives?
Gillian Hammond:That’s a great question. We’ve worked with a couple of supermarkets because we’re so committed to buying locally, we want to celebrate the produce that is produced here in the UAE. Our students have been to visit some of the organic farms and are very passionate about the possibility of growing their own food, and we know that some of our parents do that already. I believe we’ve generally seen some lightbulb moments where children think, “Huh, so, when I eat that pineapple, it has usually come from overseas. It has flown 20,000 miles….” And it blows their minds. It does help them to realise that, if we create the right environments within our own home countries, most of this food can be grown by the local farming industry.
Education UAE: I find it frustrating that some of these supermarkets boast online that they’ve got the best strawberries flown in from such-and-such a country, on the other side of the world. What a statement to make in this day and age.
Gillian Hammond: I think because of the education that we’re doing with our students, they are picking up on this more and more. We’ve heard quite anecdotally from parents that sometimes when they are in the supermarket, their children will remind them, “Don’t buy those blueberries because they’re not locally sourced. They don’t come from the UAE, or even close to the UAE.” We are trying to do our bit and make an impact, but there’s more to do.
Tell us about how you develop a growth mindset in students and staff for positive engagement.
Steve Lupton: The mindsets of our students and our staff are underpinned by our school culture. I’ve spoken broadly at several conferences this year on the importance of this, which I would define as the conscious and unconscious beliefs of people within a group setting and how this leads them to think and perform.
In a school with 95 different nationalities, we’ve been committed to developing our school culture so that all participants in our school know what our school culture is and can buy into it. If you think of a Venn diagram, there are three circles where that overlap between staff, students, and parents is very much what we believe is our school culture. That is primarily based on respect across all levels and all interactions between staff, students, parents, cleaners, and everyone within our building.
Moreover, we were one of the first schools in Abu Dhabi to appoint a specialist well-being leader for our staff, which thankfully happened just before Covid, and it was indispensable during that period. We were awarded a Teachers Alliance Gold award for our well-being initiatives during the pandemic. It’s something that I think a lot of schools have now picked up on, and they recognize that it is essential to have a well-being leader or a person on staff who specifically focuses on well-being. The engagement of parents is also really important and is similar to what Gillian is saying about the sustainability aspect. We must educate not only students but parents also so that we’re coming at it from all angles to reinforce that learning and understanding.
We’ve hosted a new Repton talk series that was run over four weeks with keynote speakers to discuss the importance of nutrition and sleep in helping students achieve academically and to prepare them for exams. We’ve recently had 17 staff trained as mental health first-aiders across an intensive two-day training to support students, particularly adolescent students, as we have seen an increase in mental health challenges amongst adolescent students, particularly after post-Covid. We only had 16 spots for the course and we opened it up to parents who may also be interested in attending and we ended up with 59 applications.
Part of the session focused on the retention of staff in an industry that will be facing global recruitment challenges over the coming years. The UAE government is predicting the requirement of around 30,000 additional teachers by 2030. Young teachers are more selective about who they want to work for and part of developing and ensuring that we have a culture of respect also allows us to focus on retaining and recruiting the best young teachers. That has been evident in our retention rates over the last few years across the Repton group of schools. We’ve had a 95% retention rate of staff, which is outstanding and allows us the consistency and stability to provide excellent teaching and learning.
As part of your growth mindset culture, do you incorporate financial literacy into your curriculum?
Steve Lupton: We’ve been working with a prominent company within the UAE developing financial literacy skills for all of our students. I think more broadly within our growth mindset philosophy, our culture underpins all that we do at Repton and our values underpin our culture and one of our values is the growth mindset. We look strongly at the research and the evidence, and we explicitly teach our students about growth mindset strategies. Importantly, we model that as staff. We celebrate effort as much as we celebrate achievement.
Gillian Hammond: Concerning financial literacy, over the past two years, we’ve been educating our students about Bitcoin. We’ve partnered with a company called Philcoin, with all of our House points being converted into Bitcoin, and then the company also donates an amount, and the winning House at the end of the year chooses which charity they donate that to. We also want our children to understand that we’re all very privileged and that we can do more to support those who aren’t as privileged and who need support. The fact that they can donate an equal amount to a charity of their choice after they’ve researched it is something that we become very excited about each year.
How will schools transform with the advancements in AI?
Hannah Cunningham, Head of Junior School at Repton Al Barsha:I find this a fascinating topic. When open AI burst on the scene with ChatGPT last year, I think it shocked the education world because all of a sudden, we had all of these tools at our fingertips,
What unifies all educators, and fortunately at Repton our board and the people who influence our policies, is a recognition that this is not something that we can afford to ignore. We have no alternative but to explore and embrace this change because we know that this is going to be the future for all of our students, so now is the time to get on board with that and look at what we can do to ensure that our students are ready for the future. This is both in terms of their workplace and how they engage safely with this new, incredibly powerful tool.
Repton has always been keen to be at the forefront of all digital innovation, including our annual digital summit. Students used AI applications to solve real-world issues, which is just incredible. We’re also preparing for our creativity festival and we’ll be using AI to assist students in looking to develop their ideas with music, drama, and the arts, and that will engage with about 75 students from across schools in the UAE, which is really exciting. We’re using our knowledge base and our students and the wealth of expertise that Repton has to share to ensure that other students within the UAE have equal access to these really important learning opportunities.
I went into a lesson recently and they were exploring all the important mosques across the world, giving students opportunities that they just wouldn’t have access to if we didn’t use and harness this technology. We’re using virtual reality in lessons, and augmented reality for traveling from Rome to Egypt, to explore all those fascinating places, that, again, our students may not necessarily otherwise have the opportunity to see in real life.
How do we ensure that our students are going to be prepared for the future when none of us knows what the future will look like? It’s a huge responsibility that we have in our hands, but one that we take seriously, and we do in all sorts of ways.
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