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Students, teachers and families of Nadeen International School at Umm Al Hassam have been celebrating their 30th anniversary through the year. It began as a big birthday party in January and concluded with a festive fair, games and prizes for the entire school last week.
The well-loved primary school with more than 350 students from over 50 nationalities is run by principal and owner Pauline Puri and her daughter Shanee.
The pair believes that their school's welcoming arms, open door policy and informal environment combined with excellent academic results are the ingredients to its success. Shanee Puri, 32, said: "We focus on the understanding of the whole child and we approach each child as an individual.
"It's not as with some bigger schools where the principal is at the top and all have working knowledge of who the students are but have to be reminded who's who. We know who's who.
"We are very personal here and with younger children that is very important. What we manage to do in this school is to keep these children as children."
The school that started with 20 pupils in 1978 was operational through the Gulf War with 12 students. It is part of the British Schools of the Middle East and takes students from pre-nursery up to Year Six.
Shanee said that the school is trying to inspire in every child their philosophy that all knowledge is valuable and make them excited about becoming a life-long learner. This year all pupils of the school have been involved in developing an organic garden that will grow a selection of fruits and vegetables.
She said: "We started out our organic garden and the children came over last weekend and helped us to prepare the soil. Now we will be asking them to grow seedlings over the winter break for a month. Every child is going to plant something in a dedicated area.
"Once they are grown we will be selling the vegetables in the school like a traditional farmers market. So it's encouraging them to go to garden centres and learn about flowers and things to do with organic farming and gardening and not to use pesticides and artificial fertilisers."
The school is also conscious of the needs of their pupils who are from different nationalities. They supplement their basic British curriculum with language and literacy skills from American, Australian and New Zealand curriculums.
The school also offers English as a second language programme for students who require extra assistance and have a team of specialists for speech and language therapy, special needs support, learning support, and individual education programmes.
Shanee added: "We are very pleased about the excellent reports we received from two other schools that our children have tended to go on to. In the last two years all of them have been placed in the top academic groups.
"And, I would say 99 per cent of the time children leave Nadeen School with a lot of confidence, a lot of enthusiasm and a lust for learning.
"We think every child deserves an opportunity to learn. So we accept children who still require extra learning support that other schools choose not to take.
"They are delightful students and they are part of mainstream school. They are either dyslexic or have a particular problem with mathematics so when it comes to early formal tests they may fail. But we have people here who can help. We don't openly advertise this because we are not fully set up yet but we are focussing on developing this programme this year."
