“If a pupil emerges from this school simply with a passport of qualifications, they’ve missed so much and we’ve failed. We want to enable children to discover their passions, not be products of a conveyor belt.”
Simon O'Connor FCCT is the founding headmaster of Harrow International School Dubai, which opened to pupils for the very first time this September. Educated at the King's School, Rochester, he read history and philosophy at Cardiff before training at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a choral scholar, a love of music that still shapes how he thinks about education. Simon spent seven years as principal of Jumeira College and took Deira International School to an "outstanding" rating in eighteen months, and is now completing a doctorate at Buckingham on organisational culture and school improvement. In this conversation, he reflects on the exhilarating, slightly terrifying experience of building a school from a blank piece of paper, why culture has to be designed before the bus rotas, and why he has deliberately pushed screens to the margins of his new school.
🎙️ Episode highlights
Simon takes us behind the curtain of opening a school from scratch: designing the curriculum, recruiting almost a hundred staff, and the moment halfway through the first day when he realised he wasn't quite sure what he was doing tomorrow.
He explains his response to the cynic's view that an international brand school is a badge and little else, and why the relationship with Harrow in the UK runs far deeper than a franchise.
He describes the concept at the heart of the school: "boarding without the sleeping," a longer, fuller day built on the belief that education exists well beyond the classroom.
He argues that culture must be deliberately designed from the outset, spending a precious day of staff induction on coaching rather than operational detail, because values plus behaviours are what make a school.
He reflects on his own winding path, a music scholar who wasn't the most academic boy and didn't hit his straps until his twenties, and why we must meet children at the speed they are learning.
His controversial opinion: technology should be marginalised to the very corners of education, because critical thinking takes time to doodle, scribble and think, and an instant answer prevents that.