Guest Articles

Schools in particular tend to mirror the communities and the societies they serve. So, the challenges you may see in a particular context will be mirrored in the departments and the classrooms of the schools in those areas. Teachers are faced with this every day and it's not just about educating or getting students through exams and educational progress. This is important, of course - to students and parents and is how schools are judged - but anyone who’s been involved in a school will know that it's about much, much more than that. 

The community they serve here in the region is distinctive, with its international school dimension and the type of students that are going through the classrooms. Dubai has got such an amazingly diverse population and this is replicated in the teaching profession here and in the diversity of students on our ELiP programme in the Middle East. This brings rich cultural diversity with all that knowledge, history and identity. It's wonderful to have all these people working together in one place, in one school in many cases. The kids they teach might also be very culturally diverse or with different linguistic abilities. 

I've visited many schools all over the world and I see many commonalities. But there is also context. Dubai and the Middle East region are distinctive because of the large expat community and the relative affluence. There's some consistency in terms of the student population and the sort of teachers here. The dominant school type here is a private fee-paying international school. Parents have a lot of influence over what happens in schools. For leadership, that can be a significant challenge with parents expecting a return on their investment through results. It's a different way of thinking – a business model in education. 

We developed the ELiP programme originally because we felt there was a gap for a programme that focused on educational leadership from an academic, research and theoretical sense but positioned to allow students to apply that academic thinking in practice. We took our experience in international schools and built the programme and then we tapped straight into the international schools which already existed around the University’s international centres. 

The majority of our students are international schoolteachers and leaders in Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Dubai. But we have other students as well from different sectors and different phases of education – such as early years, further education, higher education, NGOs.  We also have students who work in the state school sector in different parts of the world. 

We've learned a lot about leadership in the international school sector running the programme. Dubai is similar to Singapore and Hong Kong in terms of the competitive international school space. 

These schools are small to medium-sized businesses and have relatively big budgets and so need to be run with financial astuteness and business acumen. 

The head teacher, the school principal, has a lot of responsibility leading a profit-making entity based on a business model. But ultimately, they are still there to provide an education for the next generation of young people in the regions they serve. If they don’t do this well, the business model will fail. The two – education and business - can coexist but present distinctive challenges for the school leadership.

Fortunately, most educational leaders and teachers are very passionately and emotionally engaged in promoting and nurturing young people's development, so we can remain very optimistic about success.

Dr. Paul Armstrong is the Director of the part-time MA Educational Leadership in Practice (ELiP) programme, which The University of Manchester runs across all its international centres, including Dubai.