BSME Talks | Giles Pruett, Executive Principal, Arcadia British School

In this episode of BSME Talks, Nalini sits down with Giles Pruett, Executive Principal of Arcadia British School and BSME Executive Committee member, for a candid, behind-the-scenes look at leading a school through one of the most fluid periods in education - just as UAE schools prepare to return to in-person learning on Monday, 20th April.

From navigating fluctuating student engagement to tackling the big questions around exams, Giles shares the real decisions, dilemmas, and innovations that have shaped online learning (both as a school leader and as a parent) and what they mean for the transition back to the classroom.

But it’s not just about challenges. Together, they explore how schools are reimagining the student experience; from keeping communities connected to finding creative ways to bring practical and sporting activities back to life.

Honest, insightful, and full of actionable ideas, this episode is a powerful reminder of the impact educators can have when it matters most.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Hello and welcome to this episode of BSME Talks, the podcast that brings you real conversations about the things that matter in international education, both in the Middle East and beyond. I'm Nalini Cook, I'm CEO of British Schools in the Middle East, often better known as BSME. And I'm pleased to welcome our guest today, Mr. Giles Pruitt. Giles has not only been executive principal of Arcadia British School in Dubai for the last six years, I think, Charles, but he's also my colleague at BSME as an executive committee member, and he oversees student events there. So we're going to be talking about students today and how the current regional tensions are impacting both student events and some measures that perhaps can be taken to mitigate some of those slightly tougher challenges. So firstly, Giles, it's been a challenging six weeks in the UAE and perhaps throughout the wider BSME region. So how are you doing? And how is your wider school community doing?

SPEAKER_01 1:11

Yeah, great. Well, thanks very much, Nilise. Good to have good to be on, good to be on the podcast. I personally am doing really well. This is the third uh significant challenge for school leadership and schools in the last six years. As you know, we had 18 months of a pretty serious pandemic to manage. And then we were deeply affected by the floods in the region uh two years ago, uh, which wiped out about a third of my schools. Both our basements were completely covered in uh in water. We lost a lot of our key infrastructure, and so we had a really tough six months trying to get that back on while still managing the school in the hottest months of the year. So, so coming through and being part of this regional conflict, yes, it's been really uncomfortable because we don't know what we're doing from one day to the next, because obviously the the situation here is very fluid and remains fluid to a point. And so that obviously is going to create a significant amount of uncertainty for everybody. And so, really, the the biggest thing on a personal level, I'm okay with dealing with uncertainty. I've had to deal with it before. But when you're really, I mean, I'm got a sort of leadership community around me of around 5,000 people, and so dealing with 5,000 uh pieces of uncertainty, that that creates the biggest challenge, and trying to keep some form of normality, some consistency for our community groups has been the uh probably the biggest challenge as well, getting the messaging right, making sure that we're not creating either too much panic or we're not giving enough information. Uh, the community, I have to say, our um Arcadia British School and Arcadia Global School, because of course we we have two schools in our in our in our group, have been incredible and their responsivity to the changes that we've put in place. We have, of course, are experts now in adapting to online learning, and also the parents and the children are. So they're really, really quick to respond. We've had a lot of really positive feedback from our family groups uh through our parent associations and through individual families to say thank you for what we've done. Pivoting quickly onto online learning isn't is not a big challenge for a school, but obviously the broader implications for our community having some teachers located internationally, some here, families located internationally is sort of compounded the issue a little bit. Uh, but yesterday and the day before, we had a heads meeting with um the KHGA, and then Her Excellency spoke to all the teachers, which was quite heartwarming because we could sense that there was change coming with some uh immediate responses to opening up schools to adult activities. We've got 95% of our teachers in country. Uh, they've made that commitment to stay back here, to continue to support the children. Uh, we have, I think, in the region from our survey feedback, around 25% of our students and families still out of country. But the feedback from the parents about the program we're putting on has been really good. But of course, we are looking to the future and we want our children back in school because we know that is the best place for them, really, in terms of their educational development and their socialization as well.

SPEAKER_00 4:05

Absolutely. And and picking up on that, I mean, it's fantastic. It does sound like things are going as well as they possibly can at the moment. But obviously, there will be some students who are feeling slightly more challenged by being in a different country or being online, missing their friends, etc. How are you managing those struggles, those challenges? What are you doing to support the children? And and there's a huge, wide um age range, you know, in terms of if you're a three-year-old, your needs are obviously slightly different to those who are perhaps 16, 17, 18.

SPEAKER_01 4:36

Yeah, look, I mean, this entire next 30 minutes could be dedicated to that question because we have so many different permutations and so many different groups. I'm a parent as well as a teacher. I've got three children, 14, 11, and 8. And their needs are wildly different when it comes to learning from home. And we are here in Dubai, uh, so we are actually synchronized with the timings, but it still is a significant challenge for each of my children in their own different ways. Um, I've also lived through this when my children were three, four, and five years of age. So when we had uh the lockdown for COVID and we were all everybody was locked down, you know, there was there was no difference. Having young children is incredibly challenging because that their needs of supervision, support, they just behave in different ways, they're learning so rapidly and fast. That I felt was one of the most challenging time periods having young children. So, you know, I do feel a lot of empathy to our FS1 to year two families, particularly double working parents, children at home, trying to juggle their jobs, juggle their children's learning. Our program has been tailored and adapted to suit the needs. So we front loaded a lot of activities on our curriculum. We do have a strong assessment culture in the UAE, which tends to revolve around our core subjects English, math, science, Arabic, and Islamic. So we have to maintain that level of connectivity in those subject areas. So we have done a lot of front loading and reorganization of the timetable in primary in particular. Obviously, with our early childhood working towards the developmental goals, particularly through things like language development of phonics, we've had to also put that as a priority into some of the teaching uh modules. But also, we are really cognizant of screen time. You know, there's so much literature out there saying the damaging effects of screen time for children. And so little pieces of learning uh which are accessible through screen time, and then more dedicated uh learning activities for individual and small groups that can connect with each other. That's the way we've really approached our sort of three to seven years of age. Really, then coming into the middle school, the end of primary and the middle school. Again, we've tried to follow as much of the uh timetable continuity as we can, because obviously schools have staffing issues where if I mix one class into this part of the day, then they can't teach at the other end where they would have been normally. And we do have some teachers who teach across both divisions, particularly in Arabic and Islamic. So we by changing their timetable in primary, it completely reacts to the secondary timetable. So there's been challenges around that, but the team have been amazing at quickly responding to get that information. And I think the really important aspect is how we've communicated that with the parents to make sure that they have the right accessibility, they're understanding the rationale and the reason for doing that and following those clear pathways. So those adaptations are ongoing, they're still happening now. Next week, even next week, we're reshifting to more live teaching in primary based around some of those conditions. We're consciously aware that we have a lot of GL assessments which have a big impact on schools coming up in the coming weeks. We're hoping obviously that deadline is going to be pushed. And then, of course, we haven't even talked about our high need group, which is our year 11s, 12s, and 13s, who are sitting public examinations. So, of course, we've just received the news that our international IGCSDs have been cancelled by the key providers that we have, we use, and I know there are multiple boards, and we're just waiting for correspondence from OFQAL in the UK to see when our main examinations, which we we strongly anticipate, will happen, and of course the IB, we're not an IB school, neither of us schools are, but obviously they've already been cancelled as well. So there's a high level of emotional anxiety for the children in those groups who've worked for many, many years to get to these points with an opportunity to showcase what they've learned in exams, and suddenly the blanket has been pulled out from underneath them. So, how do we support those children? Again, early communication, uh, reducing the anxiety by demonstrating that they're not going to be disadvantaged by this. In fact, in some cases, they may well be advantaged because students who don't perform very well in terminal examinations are much better at demonstrating their skill set and their knowledge through a linear progression and a continual assessment, they're actually going to be advantaged here. Of course, I feel really sorry for these children because they've been hyping up to this point and getting ready for their pre-university assessments, particularly, this is our founding uh Arcadia British Schools, our founding A-level cohort, can you believe? So, our first ever cohort of A-level students are not going to be able to sit there terminal exams as normal. The team has quickly pivoted. I mean, there's a lot of work going on in secondary, particularly through the team leaders of each of the subject departments, our academic um assistant head team, it getting together now the portfolio of evidence and the tags to support this next steps that are going to go off to the exam board. So a lot of anxiety, um increasing the number of parent webinars, the little drop-in QA sessions for the students. I know uh Michael, my head of secondary Greg yesterday, ran three separate um exam-based practices with the year 11s and 13s on how to use a digital assessment tool. Because we haven't had we haven't had to use a digital assessment tool. And now suddenly they've got to sit at an exam using a digital assessment tool. So, you know, there's lots of little nuances there. And I think just demonstrating that real empathetic support for the children and know what they're going through. But really, the the big message is don't worry, don't worry. We're here to help and get you to where you need to be, uh, so that you will not be disadvantaged by this, uh, and that you're going to be able to continue on the next steps in your journey, whether that's choosing your A levels for next year or going off to university and getting onto your top choices of university places. So, so yeah, quite an interesting um selection of various developments for parents. Of course, supporting parents out of country, really challenging, isn't it? Because they are our minority. And when they say, Oh, can we readjust the timing so you can come online? It's sort of four o'clock in the well, obviously that's a really difficult question to follow, isn't it? So, what we've done, we've switched to obviously an uh an asynchronous program as well, where we record all of our lessons and we make them available on our um on our drives that children can then access the week in a normal learning time. And then when their time zone is synchronized, they can come onto those live lessons. So actually, if you've been in Europe or you've been in the UK or you're the other way, you're in uh Malaysia or Thailand, you haven't really been disadvantaged by that programme. That, of course, probably suits our older children more, really, from sort of age nine upwards. Below that, it's obviously a challenge because parents are still really being part of the learning process now for the for the young people. But again, making those quick adaptable changes has made it very suitable for the kids.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

Thank you, Giles, because I think that's a really comprehensive roundup actually of what's going on. And I think what is being experienced by many of the schools, uh not only in the UAE, but in the region, and hopefully just the reassurance for many schools of hearing that they're not alone, and for those who are out with the region, talking about, you know, understanding better what schools, uh leaders and children are uh as well as the teachers are going through at present. So I think, yeah, that's incredibly useful. Now we talked a lot there about what's going on in terms of curriculum and teaching and learning. But of course, the other thing that's really hugely affected is student events. And in your capacity, in terms of working with BSME, you oversee student events for us as part of your portfolio on the uh BSME executive. Arcadia is well known as a school that provides huge sporting and other extracurricular um provision. You yourself came up with a uh a strong sporting background, so you know the value of these things in to a child's uh development and well-being. What kind of impact has the cancellation of those things had on students, on their perhaps social skills, and maybe even their sense of belonging, their sense of community with the school, with them being online now?

SPEAKER_01 12:26

Coming with my background, my passion for the wider and more holistic parts of education, it, you know, it's my biggest, my biggest sadness when I look at children online for a period of days. I mean, we join the BSME for two reasons. One, it gives us a solidarity of schools, an opportunity to collaborate and share through professional development, teacher exchange, but the biggest one, you know, BSME provides so many different student events and not just sports, through a whole raft of different activities. Uh, we've got children from uh both Arcania schools this year taking part in uh Karan competitions, uh, art competitions, digital stream-based competitions. It's been fantastic. And and we know, and we know explicitly as professional experts in the field that students develop the softer and really important skills that are going to be needed for great life in these socialization activities. Yes, uh, academic assessments and learning is important. There's no doubt. I'm not going to take away from that, but just as important is the wider program for the children. So just not being able to go at break time along the corridor and check in with some of your friends from a different class and find out what's been going on in their lives, it does actually have a big impact on our children. Now, this regional conflict has been very different to COVID. I mean, COVID, you were locked in and you couldn't socialise. It was simple as that. And so I saw a significant impact for my children over about a six-month period on their inabilities to socialise and become more introverted and uh lose a lot of those important communication skills. Now, of course, here the strange behavior for schools is that we've got pretty much most of the country open. So some clubs are running, parks are open, malls are open, and so there is some socialization going on out of school, but not coordinated in such a way where there's so many different opportunities to get involved with student fixtures, games, events, activities. Now, that to me is one of the shortcomings of online learning. I've read the data coming out globally of the impact of the pandemic, and it was pretty clear the longer you go online, the bigger the deterioration in the learning curve for children, right? So I'm a great advocate for online learning in the short term. A regional weather disruption, for example, you can't get into school. Great, let's have five days of online learning. Great, there's no problem. Kids can adapt like that, and they're really quick, and the teachers can be there. But I'm also super conscious of the bigger impact on socialization, uh, appropriate age development, the wider program brings, being engaged in house activities and so what are we doing about that? Well, we've been looking at reorganizing the timetable to make sure that children can still do that. I mean, we are providing, we have um we're quite unique in some respects. We have a games program for every child from age seven to age 18. So we've actually been delivering those online and putting lots and lots of student uh activities through a series of uh videos and updates for the teachers, for example. We've been hosting into-house competitions, we've been working on charity events. So we had an inter-house running competition last week in conjunction with the UAE charity, try and encourage children to cycle and run as many kilometers as they can in a certain period of time. We have a lot of uh house connectivity events and activities. Obviously, we have to do those digitally. Each of those practical subjects that are much harder to deliver design, technology, art, uh, games, PE, music, which are much harder to deliver online, have had that practical element of it about joining and connecting together. Even yesterday, I had some drop-in meetings with my heads of year talking about how we can continue. Don't forget, in three or four weeks' time, we'll start the transition into the next year in our schools. So we'll start thinking about how does our, and particularly very important for year sixes into year sevens, going from one school to another, essentially, one division to another. Uh, we've been looking at ways of doing that and then improving essentially the access to those type of type of activities and encouraging our children to get involved with other things, such as the BSME uh events that putting on putting online. So, so yeah, I mean, vitally important, something that's significantly overlooked when we looked at the data coming out of the impact of COVID. It was all about, oh, look at the decline in academic performance, but no one was really talking about the socialization element of it. How crazy! I mean, look at this from this perspective. I've got a year 13 student about to sit their summer examinations remotely that have just come into the secondary school and had two years online for COVID. So these poor guys have been impacted twice now due to this. And obviously, we really, really hope that this uh regional conflict is now dissipating and it's going to allow our children to come back to school. But yeah, super important.

SPEAKER_00 16:57

Thanks, Giles. And I thank you for highlighting as well what you're doing at school. Some of those hints and tips I think will be useful to other people in terms of things like into-house competitions and of course the uh the BSME events that have either moved online or um are being added to the BSME events calendar. Final question for you. What's your advice to parents and teachers who might sense a child drifting or disengaging during this distance learning period? Um, obviously, we hope it doesn't continue for too much longer. We hope that things calm down significantly. There's already been a little bit of that dissonance. What can people do as a sort of small wins in the immediate future?

SPEAKER_01 17:37

I was coming at this as a parent as well. What I've noticed from my children is that longer the uh digital program goes on, the shorter their attention span becomes. So their ability to last for not just for an individual lesson, but last through the day, they're craving that playtime, that out-of-school activities. So, first of all, from a school's perspective, that's why we've been trying to front load a lot of the heavy lifting, the heavy lifted learning, if you like, and then move to a more opt-in, opt-out, uh, activity-based for families to make those decisions and what they want to do. We have strongly supported families who, so for example, during our PE in games program, if a parent says, I want my child to go off and go for a run or go to the gym or join a club or be part of an external activity going on, please go ahead. You know, if you have that opportunity to do that and you're doing it safely, please, that's absolutely fantastic. So that's part of that support from a parent perspective, particularly with children. What I've really noticed with my girls, isn't it weird, when they learn in pairs, they actually learn better because they're sort of bouncing and interacting ideas across each other. So we've done a lot of arranged double learning days where we've had a child come and support one of ours and then they've gone to their house and done that. We've chunked a lot of the activities into smaller parts. One of the things from the learning perspective, rather than having a live 50-minute lesson where we know an eight-year-old's attention span is about six or seven minutes, we've chunked it into front-loaded and then activities and then check-in and check-in. So we've reduced the amount of screen time, continue to try and promote the engagement, flip the activities around to make it better. So chunking those things for parents is also important. You don't be afraid to continue to try and manage the socialization aspect of your children by arranging activities and events. You know, that's super important. Dubai has done, and the UAA have done a you know, look, they've done a phenomenal job. A phenomenal job of keeping us safe. Their air defense systems, their online um remote alerts, everything that goes on there is fantastic. And we've seen that impact. Of course, there's been some very difficult and challenging tragedies, but very, very isolated across the city. So, you know, we are confident as parents, and I'm certainly confident at the school that my children are safe in this environment. And that's hence why we chose to be here and we're continuing to do what we do. So it's uh just saying to parents, you know, trust your instincts, make sure you stay safe, but give your children those socialization opportunities, chunk up the learning into small bits. Also, the other thing I say to parents is, you know, let's let's see a little bit of support for some of these teachers. Some of these teachers, I mean my wife's teaching at home online now today, and she's got three children to look after who are running three different programs at the same time. And I know there's parents in an even far worse situation to that, trying to do their day jobs online where they've got young children running around, making life very, very challenging. It's not easy. And and and let's spare a thought for some of these teachers who are managing their home life, their school life, their online lessons, their exam classes at the same time. It's it's incredibly difficult. Message from me as the principal is we want to be in school. We know being in school is the best place. We want to be here, but of course, we are always respondent to our government and their advice and the situational aspects around us. It's safety first, it's well-being first, and then we'll do what we can to try and continue to create that that great session. But yeah, I mean that's that's what I do as a as a as a as a parent, and that's what we're really trying to encourage as a as a school to keep our community going as long as this needs to go on for. And and and honestly, we genuinely hope we're back to school on the 20th and we're back to back to where we should be under normality.

SPEAKER_00 21:05

Thanks, Giles. I think some really, really handy tips there if you're a parent who's struggling a little bit at the moment, but um also some some lovely teacher love there, working incredibly hard. Um, I think everybody's working incredibly hard at the moment just to try and keep things as normal as we possibly can under the circumstances. So well done to everybody. Now we wrap up every BSME talks episode asking um about the significant influence of teachers on our own lives. Teachers often have incredibly far-reaching impact on students that they perhaps don't realize at the time. So, with that in mind, Giles, I would like to ask you which of your own teachers had the biggest influence on you and why?

SPEAKER_01 21:47

Oh, this is so personality focused, isn't it? Right. So I think I think for one message for every teacher if any teacher's going to listen to this, is you just don't really truly understand the impact you have on these children because I know. If I go out with some friends and I'm in my mid-50s and I chat, that's a terrible reveal. I chat to I chat to my friends and ask them, Tell me something about your life. They just tell me about a teacher that they remember, right? Everybody can remember this amazing teacher, it transformed their lives. And imagine what that's like now if children are stuck in certain locations and they're online and they're not with their friends, right? You as a teacher are having a huge impact. And just saying, Hello, is everything okay? How's things going? Coy, remember that bit of work you did last week was so cool, and it was a great discussion you did. That is the thing that drives and stimulates the children the most. So teachers do have a huge impact. I, well, as a person, I'm very attracted to big personalities. I find people with big personalities that really hold my attention. I've got such a small attention span. I'm a fast Twitch person and I need to get stuff done. So, like those teachers that could hold my attention. And there was one guy I had a history teacher at school from the age of 11 to 14 that just transformed my love of reading history. And his name was um Lawrence Wilmshurst. He was absolutely crazy. I think if he was if he was teaching now today, he certainly wouldn't, he would he probably would have been struck off now because he had loads of these sort of punitive actions where if you spoke out of turn, you had to write a page of historic text out on a piece of line paper and then he'd double it and treble it. And he was a really enigmatic, but he was a really enigmatic guy, and his classes were so well behaved and well organized, they really did maximize the learning. So he was a really great character. I remember just learning my early learning of the Roman Empire, the Viking conquests, and I can still probably remember some of the information he sent to me. Probably one of the most boring topics, I think, is World War I history, the uh the reparations and the treaties that took place after. I could still quote some of that now from the age of 14 because he had such an impact on me. I remembered this stuff, and I wanted to show him what I'd learnt about history, right? And so I think the message out there to the teachers is you know, show your personality, be be a be a real person to the children online and and give them something, excite them, make it interesting, and and and and they will they will remember you forever. So yeah, that's probably the person who had the biggest impact on me in education in my early years.

SPEAKER_00 24:06

Oh, thank you, Giles. And yeah, great message. Don't don't ever forget if you're teaching how inspirational you can be to those students without even realizing it. Well, thank you very much for joining us today, Giles. I know it's a busy time uh for you and for everybody in school, so we appreciate you making the time. Thank you to everyone who's listened today. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of BSME Talks, and please join us again soon for another conversation. Happy teaching.