International Schools Blog

In 2022 the MacLeod family from Alberta, Canada contacted Pearson’s CEO, Andy Bird after seeing him on a news programme talking about our qualifications being 'location agnostic' and that anyone could sit a Pearson exam, wherever they were in the world.

We can’t yet fully understand the effects of remote learning during the pandemic. But what are students back in school showing us already? We take a look.

After the challenges we’ve seen in education over the past year or so, we’ve been speaking to teachers and leading maths experts on how they see the changes to teaching and learning impacting on the future of primary maths.

A second year of disruption to examinations has brought to centre-stage questions of how and why we assess, and of the balance of assessment, teaching and learning.

With the pandemic largely preventing on-campus education across the world over the past 18 months, educators have had to significantly rethink how to continue to teach students and work with parents when the normal approaches just aren’t possible.

In a post-pandemic world, many of the things we would have only ever considered doing in-person, we now do without thinking online. We are all now so much more open to a combined online/in-person approach to practically every aspect of our lives that it has become normal to us, and the education environment is no exception.

After global school shutdowns, learning loss has become a significant problem for students everywhere. According to the majority of teachers in a McKinsey survey on lost learning, school closures have led to students being up to six months behind where they would usually be in terms of learning.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020, online learning has become a pivotal feature in daily life for teachers, students and families around the world. Yet, while countless households across the globe have now experienced the many benefits of remote education, some critics still voice doubts about its efficacy.

They flashed like beacons against the long dark sweep of the pandemic: reports of teenagers helping their teachers, parents and siblings adapt to emergency remote learning. News stories about students lobbying their city government to allocate millions for broadband and devices to help close the digital divide. Images of young adults with masks and megaphones marching for social justice every night in cities around the world.

In this article, Kai Vacher, Principal of British School Muscat in Oman explains how in early 2020, his school developed an idea that at the time seemed novel, innovative and creative: delivering a whole curriculum through a mix of online and face-to-face teaching. Of course, within a few months, the whole world was doing likewise. But what British School Muscat created was not about overcoming a pandemic, but something more fundamental: about international schools and their staff using their skills to help broaden access to education across their host country using a blended approach to teaching and learning they called FlexEd.