Edarabia had the opportunity to interview Clemmie Stewart, Executive Principal of Beech Hall School Riyadh. Stewart shared her insights on the school’s plans for 2025, her approach to academics, challenges in education, student engagement, inclusivity, and the school’s proactive measures to address student stress and bullying.
As a school that is growing very rapidly, I want to ensure that our foundations are solid and that we continue to increase our wonderfully diverse community, ensuring all pupils, staff, and parents feel empowered and happy in our environment. We have successfully started our accreditation journey with NEASC and look forward to building on this process as part of our development.
On a personal level, I want to keep exploring the Middle East and enjoy all that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has to offer us. We have a rule that we have to try something new, or explore somewhere we’ve yet to visit each weekend. This has enabled us to learn so much about the rich culture and heritage of the region, as well as try things we have never done before.
Everything we do at Beech Hall School Riyadh has our children at the heart of it. So we focus on each of their individual progress pathways and consider what we teach and how we teach to ensure they reach and unleash their potential. We focus on ensuring our professional development offer for staff is really robust and engaging, as we know from research that the input that has the greatest impact on pupil learning and experience is the adult in front of them, or alongside them in our case! Ensuring our staff are highly qualified, engaged in research and development, and sharing best practices, means our children experience excellent learning and teaching.
In terms of new ideas, we are currently working on our Senior School offer, growing our elective options for Grades 9 and above who are pursuing the American curriculum. Seeing our pupils access courses from Spanish to Psychology, Music to Drama, alongside their core subjects, is really exciting. We are proud to be able to tailor our offer to the pupils we serve and to see their interests and passions blossom.
For me, AI is a challenge, but also an opportunity. We need to ensure that pupils are well-equipped to live and thrive in a world where this sort of developing technology is prevalent. They need to be able to live with it, learn from it, incorporate it into their working lives, but also hold on to those human skills of creativity, empathy and resilience. We, as educators, need to think deeply about how we can build that into our curriculum, but also the wider hinterland of school life. Alongside that, students (and adults!) need to develop healthy habits around the use of tech: knowing when it adds value, but also knowing how and when to switch it off, and have a full break!
I also think we need to really revolutionise the way we think about recruitment, retention and how we develop the pipeline of talent coming into the world of education. We need to ensure that we have really strong numbers of people coming into the profession, and reflect deeply on how we protect that talent, so that we have the right people teaching our children. The current data around this shows we have a major issue, and small tweaks here and there are not going to protect us from the gap between demand and the number of people training and remaining in teaching. Time for a major rethink!
Anyone lucky enough to see children develop from a young age will know the innate curiosity and ability to learn that lies within us all. The sheer number of questions asked by a toddler is a testament to that! It is our job as educators to keep that curiosity alive and that passion to know more, burning within. I see this best in our Early Years educators, who plan around each individual in front of them and create amazing learning experiences that fulfil and engage their young learners. I don’t think I have ever heard a KG child tell me that they are bored! At Beech Hall School Riyadh, we work hard to keep that approach all the way through the school: learning is tailored to the pupils’ needs and interests; stretch and challenge are prevalent throughout, ensuring that they are moving on with their learning, and teachers think deeply about how to motivate and engage. The choice is critical to that, and seeing our older pupils making really informed choices about their subjects and interests is really satisfying.
We also work hard to normalise ‘the struggle’. We will all fail. We will all make mistakes. By normalising that, children are taught to see it is a critical part of the learning process. For those with perceived barriers to learning and additional needs, it is critical that the adults adjust what they do and how they do it, to meet the needs of children. Rigid approaches to education result in children feeling like failures. We can’t have a factory model applied to education, expecting all children to learn and behave in the same way. We adapt to the child and not the other way around.
Beech Hall School Riyadh is a proudly inclusive school where children of all ages, nationalities, strengths, backgrounds and experiences are taught to be proud of who they are and where they come from. We seek to design an approach where they get to try all sorts of different things, enabling passions and interests to emerge, alongside skills and talents. All of these are praised equally. From Rubik’s cube house competitions to sporting events to Arabic poetry writing to drumming, we celebrate it all! We get to know each individual, which in turn gives them the faith and the confidence to showcase the things that they are good at, whilst also working on the things that they find harder. This is critical to children developing a meaningful sense of success, alongside a sense of pride.
As a growing school, we welcome new pupils and families to our community very regularly. We tailor this process to each family and their unique experience and ensure that they are supported every step of the way.
Children have the right to feel safe and secure at all times, and certainly when they are in school. We work really hard to promote and protect a sense of calm, good behaviour and relationships rooted in respect. We take a very strong stance on any perceived bullying or examples of unkind behaviour, ensuring all those involved are aware of how serious that sort of behaviour is and how it can’t be tolerated in our school. Thankfully, these examples are very rare indeed, but we are realistic and are always open-minded to the fact that it can happen. Our Pastoral team are very strong indeed and supports all children and parents to ensure our behaviour is the very best that it can be.
Mental health and wellbeing are critical factors in a child’s development, and we take a very proactive approach to ensuring that we are supporting our pupils to build a toolkit upon which to draw when they are feeling sad, worried, or stressed. We use a great application called Pulse which enables us to gather and track data on wellbeing, and our Home Room teachers pride themselves on the support they offer our children. We also have a trained counsellor on-site at all times. Our recently launched peer mentoring programme has also been highly successful, seeing our older pupils support younger pupils with any issues on their minds.
We have developed our own framework for learning that centres on 6 core strands we feel all children need access to in order to thrive: mental health and wellbeing; mindset; digital literacy; global citizenship; sustainability; enterprise and innovation. We believe that if pupils develop core skills in these areas, they will be ready to be lifelong learners and lifelong earners, whilst also building powerful relationships and living healthy lives. We believe in developing pupils’ characters to be confident, self-assured and interested, which will also serve them in their lives after school. In addition to these areas, we also offer life skills such as cooking, public speaking and learning languages, all of which will enable our pupils to live independently. We really believe in the power of choice and so we support and empower our pupils to make decisions, think deeply about what they want and consider options. This is a superb life skill!
We are really keen to work with our parents: so much so that we built them a beautiful café that they are welcome to spend time in throughout the day! We want to work in meaningful partnership with parents and within the local community. As such, we have developed ways to take feedback, share ideas and also explore ways in which the parents can add value to the pupil experience in school. We have a fantastic team of parents called our Parent Champions who work with us to continually develop our school and our provision. We also regularly invite parents in for information sessions, 1:1 meetings, wellbeing Wednesdays, working breakfasts, and celebrations, and we very much look forward to our community Iftar celebrations during Ramadan.
We want to cultivate a community where teachers join us and stay for a long time. We know that the children and parents form deep relationships rooted in trust and that these are hard to replace. We work with our teachers in the same way we work with our pupils: we try to tailor our support according to what they need. We also support our teachers to engage in meaningful development opportunities. We have teachers with doctorates, teachers currently undergoing the action-research part of their master’s and teachers finishing their PGCE training alongside qualified teachers in the classroom. We are excited by teachers who want to upskill and learn more, and are keen to support them. Many of our teachers are also keen to lead new projects and initiatives that enhance the provision here: one recent example being Ms Dim, who launched our first esports team and competed on the international stage! If our staff have the ideas and the passion, it is our job to enable them to do what they do best: inspire and empower our pupils.
Absolutely! As a growing school, we are regularly adding layers of senior and middle leadership and are always keen to appoint from within. So often, internal candidates bring a real wealth of knowledge and have shown they are already fully aligned with the ethos and culture of the school. This, alongside exciting new talent coming in, makes for a really inspiring balance of ideas, initiatives and support for all staff. We are also part of a wider group of schools through Blenheim International. This enables our staff to work across the group, collaborate with more staff in other parts of the world, and enables them to apply for leadership development and roles globally.
That is a tough one! Whether it is a Grade 1 learning to cook finger food, to a student competing on the global stage as part of our esports club, all of our activities have real merit when considering future skills and experiences (as well as having fun!). That said, clubs such as Model United Nations, or being a voted member of the School Council, really enable pupils to speak up, be heard and formulate their ideas in a way that can have a meaningful impact on others. I truly believe that when a pupil realises the impact that they can have on others and the skills they have to offer, the world becomes their oyster.
I know I have been successful at work if all of the members of our community – pupils, staff and parents – feel valued, heard, seen, safe and that they belong. We are all on our own path of growth and development, and my job is to put all the steps in place for that path to be traversed in an engaging, challenging and inclusive way. Seeing that sense of success in every child and adult is the ultimate honour for me, and reminds me daily that I have the best job in the world.
Inclusion is not just a right: it is the key to living a truly meaningful, fulfilling and happy life, by enabling everyone around you to be part of something magnificent.
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