ICS Milan International School - Symbiosis

Eight years after their foundation KC School and Ludum School, who have up until now been partners in a collaborative project for primary education, will merge into a single educational entity to be known as the International Community School (ICS), the same name as one of the most prestigious schools of the NACE group located in the British capital. NACE School owns and operates 30 schools with over 10,000 students in Spain, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Andorra, and India. It is one of the six largest groups of private international schools in the world.

We provide an international learning context that sets itself apart by valuing its Italian cultural roots and by embracing other cultures, in a system of dialogue and promotion of differences. Every day, within this fast-developing backdrop, we call on our students to plan using teaching methods that develop their observational, research and planning skills as well as the ability to think differently.

As a Scuola Paritaria (an officially recognised school), our school also adopts the national recommendations for the curriculum issued by MIUR (the Ministry of Education), and stands firm with its roots in Italian culture. The Italian language programme, which follows the most up to date guidelines issued by the Accademia della Crusca, and the Italian history and culture programmes are designed for mother tongue Italian speakers. A specific programme for Italian as an additional language learners is available for children of other nationalities.

At ICS International School we teach creativity, responsibility, respect, diversity, relationships and connection: a learning path that supports knowledge, reflection and adaptation in order to be able to connect all things that are complex, yet intertwined.

Our system fosters a balanced development of different personalities. It is fluid because it combines the importance of rules with a sense of expressive creativity, challenge and imagination. It is technical because it provides the necessary tools for becoming "masters" of our own abilities. It is contextualised and responsible because it nurtures and stimulates each developmental and learning phase of every child by placing respect for others and for ourselves at its centre.

The world today changes radically and quickly: scenarios change, jobs transform, and in some cases they disappear altogether, leaving space for new and surprising professions. We wondered how we could equip our children to be citizens of the world and to take steps into it with ease and independence, how they could contribute by pre-empting, reading and interpreting new needs and identifying and proposing new solutions.

ICS International School was born from this dream and this question: an international educational centre that maintains strong ties with the area, with Italian culture and with design culture, from which it borrows its values, as wells as its style, that make the Italian spirit or 'Italianity' stand out all over the world.

Design as research and planning, as the tools that allow students to have an in-depth knowledge of a problem, within different settings, to face and solve it by following a process they will have made their own in their learning journey at International School.

We value beauty not just in its literal sense but for its wider meaning, as a sense of aesthetics that encompasses numerous areas. From the beauty of a space designed to welcome young students and inspire in them the same approach to things, to a continuous regeneration of beauty and to the aesthetic sense of knowledge. Because the learning and development process of knowledge runs hand in hand with the desire to produce something that other people enjoy and that can therefore be shared. It is a case of educating the eye to recognise beauty and the mind to imagine new forms of beauty.

ICS International School's value par excellence, borrowed from the design world and which is the basis of our whole education system. Each learning activity is underpinned by the phases that mark out the project: understanding the problem, asking the right questions, analysis of the external objective context and the emotional and subjective personal context, up to identifying possible answers and solutions.

A fundamental part of ICS International School philosophy is the role of context: from the classroom at school, from the family, from the local area, to the whole city: the entire area where the student lives can be a place for exchange, sharing and enrichment. In the analysis and interpretation of data, transversal information gathered from other contexts is essential. Knowledge is not schematically boxed into rigid categories. Learning moves from one subject to another in a holistic exploratory process.

At ICS International School we strongly believe in individuals and their resources. We believe in the strength of cultural differences as well emotional and personality differences. A person's style is born from their own diversity, which is permeated by context and with which they can give an answer. Giving students the right amount of time needed to dedicate to their research, to allow experiences and knowledge to settle, means cultivating individuals' talents, giving them the opportunity to grow away from homogenisation and towards individuality.