Our own High School, Al Warqa, is a GEMS owned and run school, serving 4,688 predominantly Indian boys aged 5-19 (KG to Grade 12). The CBSE based school currently has a rating of Good by Dubai’s education regulator, the KHDA, a level of education it has maintained for the last four out of five years.

The school employs 215 teachers and has a student to teacher ratio of 20:1. In total 21 nationalities are represented at the school, with those coming from Indian families representing the majority.

The school follows the CBSE curriculum and students sit CBSE examinations in Grades 10 and 12 every March.

The Kindergarten section of the school is a recent addition, and provided education for 59 children in two sections of Kindergarten 1 in its first year. In 2012/13 the phase was “not performing well”. This has since been addressed.

The KHDA notes Our Own High School, Al Warqa – Boys achieves good attainment and progress in Islamic Education and English in primary, middle and
secondary phases, and in mathematics and science in middle and secondary phases; the good teaching and curriculum in the middle and secondary phases; outstanding personal and social development in the middle and secondary phases and community and environmental responsibility in primary phase; and the school’s good distributive leadership, self-evaluation, improvement planning, partnership with parents and management of the school.

In addition to improvements at the KG phase, there have also been improvements in Grade 10 and Grade 12 external CBSE examination results; and there is stronger self-evaluation, improvement planning, monitoring and evaluation of teaching and learning. The school does not publish details of its academic performance (something inconsistently handled by GEMs Education schools), but does reveal the university destinations of its students. The school claims a 100 percent graduation into higher studies. Interestingly according to the school’s Web site the vast majority head to universities in the UAE (although this information conflicts with the information we have in our Q and A), with Indian based universities coming second. Canada comes a distant third as the destination of choice.

Earlier reports recommended significantly reducing classroom sizes to allow better teaching and learning opportunities across the school. This is not mentioned in the school’s latest report as a recommendation, however with class sizes from Grade 1 to 12 still averaging between 33 and 39 students this should be a priority for the school.

The school does offer extra curricular activities, details of which may be found here, however some parents and students do not believe these are presently sufficient. It is not clear whether these clubs are part of the school fee, or incur an extra cost. WSA likes the “Beyond the Curriculum” activities (a theme for GEMs schools) which seem to both help shape the human being, as well as prepare students for the next phases of their lives. Activities such as internship preparation, and community service are to be applauded.