New Dubai school with fees of Dh130,000 eyes path to Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard

North London Collegiate vows to offer direct route to best universities.

Daniel Lewis, principal of North London Collegiate School’s Dubai campus, said the school is intended to appeal to parents who are ‘genuinely ambitious for their children’. Reem Mohammed / The NationaShow more

DUBAI // One of the UK’s most prestigious schools will charge record fees when it opens a new Dubai campus next year.

But the North London Collegiate School insists it will offer pupils a clear path to some of the world’s top universities.

The school, for boys and girls, will open in September 2017 with places costing up to Dh130,000 a year for final-year pupils.

It hopes to capitalise on the aspirations of highly-ambitious parents and pupils seeking to attend universities such as Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard.

Six years ago, the school launched a branch in South Korea and already its International Baccalaureate point average has risen to 38 out of 45.

“Thirty-eight, that’s an Oxbridge offer, that will get you into Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard,” said Daniel Lewis, principal of the school’s Dubai campus.

“I mean, it’s only been open for six years that school, but they are already sending students to Berkeley, to Stanford, to Columbia, to Yale, to Oxford, to Cambridge.”

The school, founded in 1850, was last year named the top General Certificate of Secondary Education school by The Times, and has been the highest-ranked International Baccalaureate school in the UK for 12 years.

It has many high-profile former pupils, including Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour.

“We want to open high-performing schools that reflect the quality of the home school in the UK,” said Mr Lewis. “Our reputation in the UK is very much based on our output, our outcomes for the students.

“Our numbers going into Oxford and Cambridge, for example are exceptionally high – one of the highest in the UK.”

Mr Lewis said the school would directly run the Dubai campus and was not willing to simply hand over the name to another school operator.

“We made a decision when we first went into this with the Korean project, that we were not going to do what other UK schools have done,” he said.

“They tend to hand over their name, take a royalty and then don’t really have much to do with what’s going on in that overseas school.

“It would be damaging for our reputation to have an overseas school that was just kind of trotting along and being OK.”

Some of the staff recruited for the Dubai campus come from the school’s other branches.

But the academic quality comes at a price. When it opens in the Sobha Hartland development in Mohammed bin Rashid City, fees will range between Dh83,000 for pre-kindergarten to Dh130,000 for pupils entering Grades 11 and 12.

The annual tuition fee covers textbooks and reading materials, but excludes transport, uniforms or educational trips.

The school is offering a founding members’ discount of between 15 and 20 per cent, bringing the annual tuition costs into line with Dubai’s other top-performing schools.

“We are appealing to parents who genuinely are ambitious for their children, are looking to send their children to top universities, who might otherwise have thought about sending their children back home and who really want something different,” Mr Lewis said.

The move comes amid considerable competition among top private schools in recent years.

In April, The National reported that parents struggling with high fees were pulling their children out of school to find cheaper alternatives or send them home, with one school dealing with 250 transfers.

In the same month, Gems Education said it would merge Dubai American Academy with the newer Gems Nations Academy, months after it opened. The Dubai American Academy Nations will open in September.

Lyn Soppelsa, community manager with the online UAE guide WhichSchoolAdvisor, said the new Dubai school was not just another from the UK being established in the country.

The school’s strong academic performance and reputation may be enough to attract parents despite the high fees, she said.

“There are families who either are in a position to afford it, for whatever reason, or who believe that it’s so important that they are prepared to make sacrifices in other areas to provide their children with the education they believe is the right one for them.”