Unlocking the Hidden Curriculum

Dubai, UAE
November 23-24, 2024

The World Schools Summit brings together leaders and decision-makers from schools, academia, NGOs, and the public and private sectors including tech companies, to transform teaching and learning by harnessing the Hidden Curriculum.

Participation in the World Schools Summit is free to attend and by invitation or application only.

A truly global conference
bringing together
the brightest stars in education

600 school leaders from around the world

Leading figures in global education

Addressing the sector’s most vital issues

Empowering schools with the hidden curriculum

Programme

The principals of schools that have triumphed in the World’s Best School Prizes and achieved certification in the Best School to Work programme will share their best practices and innovative solutions alongside leading figures in global education.

Innovation & Technology

Leadership & Development

Whole Child Approaches

Professional Wellbeing

Global Collaboration

Leadership Council

Our expert Leadership Council guide will guide the programme of the World Schools Summit, drawing on their decades of knowledge and experience in education and in leading schools.

Alex Crossman

Headmaster of London Academy of Excellence, London, UK

Asha Alexander

Principal of GEMS Legacy School, Dubai

Duriya Aziz

Senior Vice President
(International, Education)
Scholastic Inc

Farah Sarraj

Chief Corporate Officer
Al Futtaim School Management Company

Fiona Cottam

Principal of Hartland International School, Dubai

Kiran Bir Sethi

Founder of Riverside School, India

Mark Leppard MBE

Principal, The British School Al Khubairat, UAE

Sandra Ospina

Head of Learning & Innovation, SEK International School, Saudi Arabia

Simon O’Connor

Director of Deira International School, Dubai

Vijita Patel

Principal of Swiss Cottage School, London, UK

William Campbell

Founding Head of School, Franklin School, USA

Venue & Hotels

The World Schools Summit will be held at Deira International School, Dubai, UAE on November 23-24, 2024.

Kiran Bir Sethi

Founder of Riverside School, India

Kiran Bir Sethi is an Indian designer, educationist, education reformer, and social entrepreneur. With a degree in visual communication from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, she ran a flourishing design practice, but it was when her children started going to school that Sethi recognised her true calling -putting design thinking into education.

She founded the award winning Riverside School in Ahmedabad that focuses on empowering children with the I CAN MINDSET. She then founded aProCh ( an initiative to make cities more child friendly ) and Design for Change, which is today the largest movement of change for and by the children where children use the simple framework of Feel/ Imagine /Do/Share to design solutions for some of their greatest challenges.

Her most recent venture is the Riverside Learning Center which offers training programmes to empower schools across the world to become ‘I CAN SCHOOLS’ by using the codified processes from Riverside.

Over the years, Kiran, Riverside and Design for Change have won several accolades and Awards, and some of the most recent ones are : Riverside wins the World’s Best School Prize for Innovation, HundrEd.org selects Design for Change into the Hall of Fame, The Earth Prize, the Rockefeller Innovation Award, The Lego Remagine Award, The Lexus prize, was The Top 10 Global Teacher nominee and the Light of Freedom Award. She is an Ashoka and Yidan Fellow.

Sethi is a published author, having written a book, ‘Every Child CAN’ for HarperCollins, which chronicles the journey and offers readers a glimpse into Riverside’s unique design-led approach to empowering children.
Born in Bangalore, India, Sethi comes from a family of designers. She lives in Ahmedabad with her 2 children, Raag and Jazz and her husband, Geet. She loves life, dark chocolate and Govinda movies!

Asha Alexander

Principal of GEMS Legacy School, Dubai

Asha Alexander is Principal at GEMS Legacy School, Dubai and Executive Leader of Climate Change at GEMS Education. With 35 years of experience in the provision of education to K-12 students, she has overseen the school’s transition to an exclusively digital curriculum.

Passionate, driven to achieve aspirational goals and ready to take on any challenge, she believes in nurturing students’ hearts and minds and is particular about a value-based education. She is excited by the prospect of watching every child achieve his or her potential. Asha is a UN certified Climate Change Leader and has made presentations at several Conference of Parties (COP) and other international conferences and has conducted workshops on leadership, and change management for schools in India and UAE. She has led the school’s Twinning Program with 87 schools enabling schools to develop partnerships around the world to embed the SDGs. Currently she has established GEMS Hub Schools for Sustainability in Italy, Indonesia, Malawi and India and is working with the Ministry of Education in UAE to bring Climate Literacy to schools in the UAE. She has been recognized as a UNCC Champion at the 60th anniversary of UNITAR this year at Geneva.

Duriya Aziz

Senior Vice President (International, Education), Scholastic Inc, Singapore

Duriya Aziz believes that education is the way to a better future for all. She considers herself fortunate to work as a learning ambassador focused on reading and math, bringing best practices and effective pedagogies to schools, educators, parents, and learners in more than 50 countries, through programs that use proven and emerging methods and technologies in ways that are culturally and contextually appropriate. She finds that there is nothing more satisfying than seeing usage, engagement, and efficacy numbers go up and up and up! She has had the privilege of introducing Singapore math around the world, including in the US, Australia, New Zealand, India, Turkey, Oman, Costa Rica, Chile, Colombia and the UK. The author of several math and literacy course materials and children’s books, she regularly leads professional development in curriculum and course design, math, literacy and creative and critical thinking. Passionate about community service, she participates in programs counselling young people on their education and career and helps women entrepreneurs start and build their businesses and careers.

Farah Sarraj

Chief Corporate Officer, Al Futtaim School Management Company

Dr Farah Sarraj currently holds the role of Chief Corporate Officer at Al Futtaim School Management Company; she also leads a dedicated centre for excellence in Arabic founded in 2018 by the Al Futtaim Education Foundation. Dr Sarraj’s advocacies include education for the 22nd Century, bilingualism, raising the profile of Arabic as a language for thought and life, and education for global citizenship. Dr Sarraj held several senior school leadership roles in the UK before she moved to the UAE in 2011. In the UAE, Dr Sarraj served on the senior leadership team of a start-up school in the northern emirates before moving to Ajman University, where she lectured in the College of Education at undergraduate and post-graduate levels. Dr Sarraj holds an MA and PhD in English Literature/Early Women’s Writing from the University of Manchester, a PGCE/QTS from Brunel University, London and an MSc in Educational Leadership from the University of Portsmouth. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts and is currently pursuing a Master’s in the Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health at Kings College London.

Sandra Ospina

Head of Learning & Innovation, SEK International School, Saudi Arabia

Sandra has more than a decade of experience in education. She has taught from nursery to university level, has developed science curricula, and has held leadership roles in the past few years. Sandra's educational philosophy centers on nurturing the whole child, which in short means attending to a child's cognitive, social-emotional, physical, and ethical development while inspiring their curiosity, and creativity.

In her current role as Head of Learning and Innovation at SEK Riyadh international school, she is working closely with allthe faculty to ensure that the curriculum, teaching methodologies, and resources align with the IB philosophy to provide the children at the school with an exceptional educational experience.

Sandra has a BA in Chemistry, BS in Biology, MA in Biology education from Brooklyn College(New York), an M.ed in International Educational Policy from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and is currently working on her Executive Master in Business Administration.

Vijita Patel

Principal of Swiss Cottage School, London, UK

Vijita Patel is the Principal of Swiss Cottage School, Development and Research Centre, a large special school for 260 pupils in London. Vijita is passionate about the role of education in developing an equal society, and its fundamental purpose in reducing the marginalisation of pupils with additional needs.

Vijita is an advocate of empowering educators as leaders of learning design, and the responsibility of school leaders in creating school cultures that cultivate teacher agency. She works with school leaders, governors, and Local Authorities as a National Leader of Education. She equally enjoys training early career teachers on the neuroscience of learning. Vijita is a Fellow of the Chartered College of Teachers, and a Trustee for Special Olympics Great Britain, Challenge Partners, and the Artists in Residence Charity.

Swiss Cottage School, DRC was designated as an Apple Distinguished School in September 2021 and has six consecutive Ofsted ‘Outstanding’ Inspection outcomes.

Alex Crossman

Headmaster of London Academy of Excellence, London, UK

Asha Alexander is Principal at GEMS Legacy School, Dubai and Executive Leader of Climate Change at GEMS Education. With 35 years of experience in the provision of education to K-12 students, she has overseen the school’s transition to an exclusively digital curriculum.

Passionate, driven to achieve aspirational goals and ready to take on any challenge, she believes in nurturing students’ hearts and minds and is particular about a value-based education. She is excited by the prospect of watching every child achieve his or her potential. Asha is a UN certified Climate Change Leader and has made presentations at several Conference of Parties (COP) and other international conferences and has conducted workshops on leadership, and change management for schools in India and UAE. She has led the school’s Twinning Program with 87 schools enabling schools to develop partnerships around the world to embed the SDGs. Currently she has established GEMS Hub Schools for Sustainability in Italy, Indonesia, Malawi and India and is working with the Ministry of Education in UAE to bring Climate Literacy to schools in the UAE. She has been recognized as a UNCC Champion at the 60th anniversary of UNITAR this year at Geneva.

Simon O’Connor

Director of Deira International School, Dubai

Simon O’Connor is the Director of Deira International School – an outstanding rated all through UK/IB curriculum school based in Festival City, Dubai. Simon is also Chief of Education for the Al Futtaim Education Foundation, working across their portfolio of schools. Simon has over 25 years of experience in education and joined DIS in August of 2020. Prior to this he was Principal of Jumeirah College, an outstanding school in Dubai, since 2013.

Simon is passionate about learning and ensuring all students are challenged in lessons for them to achieve their full potential. He is also very interested in school leadership and is currently studying for Doctorate with the University of Buckingham, researching the impact of a focus on organisational culture in international schools.

Before moving to the UAE, Simon taught History and Politics for over 20 years in a variety of different school contexts. In his last role in the UK, Simon worked as a school leader in a very successful grammar school in Kent. His role there was curriculum lead and was also responsible for the management of a teaching school and working across an academy chain of schools which he helped to found.

As a student Simon studied for a BA in History and Philosophy at the University of Wales, College of Cardiff where he was a choral scholar at Llandaff Cathedral. He then studied for a PGCE at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was also a choral scholar. Simon also holds a Master’s Degree in Education Leadership, and a National Professional Qualification for Headship.

Fiona Cottam

Principal of Hartland International School, Dubai

Asha Alexander is Principal at GEMS Legacy School, Dubai and Executive Leader of Climate Change at GEMS Education. With 35 years of experience in the provision of education to K-12 students, she has overseen the school’s transition to an exclusively digital curriculum.

Passionate, driven to achieve aspirational goals and ready to take on any challenge, she believes in nurturing students’ hearts and minds and is particular about a value-based education. She is excited by the prospect of watching every child achieve his or her potential. Asha is a UN certified Climate Change Leader and has made presentations at several Conference of Parties (COP) and other international conferences and has conducted workshops on leadership, and change management for schools in India and UAE. She has led the school’s Twinning Program with 87 schools enabling schools to develop partnerships around the world to embed the SDGs. Currently she has established GEMS Hub Schools for Sustainability in Italy, Indonesia, Malawi and India and is working with the Ministry of Education in UAE to bring Climate Literacy to schools in the UAE. She has been recognized as a UNCC Champion at the 60th anniversary of UNITAR this year at Geneva.

William Campbell

Founding Head of School, Franklin School, USA

William Campbell is the Founding Head of a pioneering educational institution in the United States of America. He is recognized for his expertise in harmonizing the rich tapestry of historical teaching methodologies with the demands of contemporary, purpose-driven curricula.

With leadership experiences spanning multiple countries and curricula, he is adept at navigating the complexities of the educational landscape at International, National, and State levels. His leadership philosophy revolves around cultivating dynamic learning environments that nurture critical thinking, creativity, and adaptability among students and faculty alike.

Mark Leppard MBE

Principal, The British School Al Khubairat, UAE

Mark is a successful and ambitious school leader of an outstanding British international school. In 2015 Mark was awarded an MBE for his services to education and has an M.Ed in Educational Leadership. In 2023 Mark won the SchoolsCompare.com Best Principal in the UAE Award. His focus is on team building, in terms of motivation, personnel and structure, ensuring that the students benefit from these developments. He has a lifelong passion for learning and ensures that the student is at the heart of all decisions that are made. Holistic education is fundamental to Mark's philosophy and he believes that learning should not be restricted just to the formal classroom. Mark has a track record of success, having led schools through 7 'Outstanding' school inspections and accreditations. He is a lead school inspector and has inspected a variety of schools around the globe.

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