Deira International School is located in the new part of old Dubai – Festival City, and is currently home to just over 1,492 students (up 100 on last year and 300 on the last two academic years) from a mixed range of nationalities (over 80 in total), including a strong local presence (around 13% of the student body are Emirati). There are 147 full-time teachers (up 4 on the year and 17 over two years), including the Director and senior management team.

All teachers in the school have appropriate teaching qualifications.

The curriculum is based on the English National Curriculum with the International Baccalaureate (IB) and vocational courses at the post-16 stage. Students take the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) at the end of Year 11 and the IB Diploma or Certificate at the end of Year 13.

The school claims a maximum classroom size of 26 – which would put it mid-table for Dubai schools following the English system.

The school can now be considered a consistently ‘Good’ school, having been rated in that grade by the KHDA for three years in a row, moving up one grade after three Acceptable rankings from 2008/9 to 2010/11.

In its 2012/13 report the KHDA noted “a strong drive for improvement, with the leadership team and teaching staff sharing the vision and determination to ensure all students did as well as they could’; echoed in 2013/14 with “school leaders and all staff had worked extremely hard to address issues arising from the previous inspection and had been successful in taking the school further along the journey of improvement.”

This is clearly a school that is not content with its Good rating.

The school has had a ‘new’ Director since January 2012. Jeff Smith had been the Principal of an academically successful, selective grammar school in the United Kingdom for five years – Guernsey Grammar School and Sixth Form Centre who left the post in August 2011. Previously Mr Smith had been the “Representative of the British Education Department” in Indonesia.