Best International schools in United Arab Emirates

My son is now into inquiry about life and what he likes

Would not recommend this school any bit. My son spent 4 years, but the last year was particular awful. My complaints of bullying of my son were completely ignored and swept under the carpet.

I had genuinely liked the school when I had my son admitted to it in 2019, the principal was open, respectful and with a strong disposition to listening and problem solving. Not anymore !

Currently the strategy is, just don't do much, sweep all problems under the carpet and revel in inaction. Similar is the case with the school parent association, that sits in its little utopic ivory tower, with no sense of cooperation or consensual opinion/decision-making with parents.

Lastly, the parking and the entry-exit options are awful. On any day, it would take over 30 minutes to just get out of the school area, whereas it would normally take just 20 minutes to just get home. After a long day of learning, I wouldn't put my children through a traffic agony.

Happy to be out, such a relief !

I play football there now and then. They have 2 big pitches which you can play 11-a-side. They also have tennis courts.

Could not be more dissatisfied by a school.

It has somehow managed the incredible feat of making my kid hate school, which is a first, and annoying us parents, as a 10+ year old school, it still doesn't have proper infrastructure to enable parents to do easy drop off and pick ups, which routinely end up taking over an hour.

No sense of community and belonging seal the deal.

This is the perfect example as to why you probably shouldn't send your kids to a big school, let alone one that is poorly thought of, built and run.

Superb school where my children are extremely happy. The Principal is very experienced and is making some great changes to make the school an excellent choice in the Dubai IB school market.

We went with our school two times for gymnastics competition seems like nice places and really huge .

One of the bad teaching experience miss Sara khatoon really not a good teacher in gems international I will remove my daughter from gems international she has lots of attitude I dun know how she got and became a teacher she is just like maid .....gems international has to remove miss Sara khatoon

An outstanding school with highly engaged staff and educators.

My son has been there since kindergarten and our experience has been great. The school fosters a sense of community within a vibrant, inclusive environment.

Parents and students are encouraged to get involved and there is a real focus on nurturing creativity and promoting compassion and respect... which I view as a priority.

Great facilities and plenty of choices for extracurricular activities to support building character and developing talents beyond academic achievement.

As a grade 12 student who has spent an ample time at this school from grade 7 till grade 12 (continuing). I love this school because you can express being yourself. For example, I enjoy swimming and the school has a lovely swim pool and swim team. We do a lot of competitions but above all there's so much to do if you like writing there's a club for that, if you like football there's a big team for that.

This school is so internationally diverse with so many people from different backgrounds, I have made friends with people from Poland, Brazil, Denmark and more. I've had a great time in this school and I will miss it when I graduate.

As an alum of Nord Anglia Dubai, I strongly believe the following should be noted before you consider sending your child here: there is no doubt a culture of classism and subtle racism that pervades the student body, the parents, and some of the teaching staff.

I’ll leave you with one example that should make your bones shudder and speak for itself: Chinese New Year 2020 was on the 25th of January, when there had been 0 recorded cases of COVID in the UAE. The school had scheduled its annual troupe of professional Chinese folk dancers coming in to perform.

However, under pressure from xenophobic parents fearing that the “Chinese dancers” would presumably infect their children (despite the dancers being residents of the UAE), the school cancelled the performance. Keep in mind this was well before any directives were issues locally even recommending such actions, and also during the same week the students had returned from their trips abroad (arguably making them more of an infection risk than anybody).

Another enormous systemic problem in this school is the deep lack of support for students; my experience in this secondary and IB program was marked by prolonged periods of depression which went completely undetected and unsupported. In University, I received an ADHD diagnosis which was never noticed or cared for during my time at this school - what I now recognize as symptoms of ADHD such as inattentiveness and inability to keep up with my peers on course content were only scrutinized and used to blame me for my own struggles. When my performance would slip greatly, the only questions that were asked were “why are you being careless” instead of checking if something was wrong. This is not an outlier, many of the people I was around were also facing great enough social and educational stress to develop mental health problems. In my opinion, multiples more professional effort was put into policing the students’ uncomfortable and unfit-for-the-climate uniforms than making sure the students were not suicidal.

As for the student culture, I can mostly only speak for my own graduating class in saying that cliques are the default, and that such “friend groups” not only actively excluded people they deemed weird, but also harassed them in person or digitally. No amount of superficial talks given by the school administration had affected this - no matter how many students with learning disabilities, of minority races, etc. were subjected to harassment.

There were many incredible people who worked here whom I am proud to be a student of, but good apples in an otherwise environment do not unfortunately suffice.

I graduated from here feeling isolated and happy to finally get out. What I and many other students experienced would be called, in my opinion, a criminal level of negligence, and being more focused on school statistics and appearances rather than the wellbeing and lasting education of students.

If you love your child, you would not send them to this school until the administration addresses these problems, apologizes, and demonstrates a plan to fix its deep problems.

Excellent facilities though, so if you don’t care about the above go ahead.

AMAZING SCHOOL! I never want to leave this school.The kids and teachers are nice and kind. The teachers are the best I have ever met and seen.

The school is amazing in all aspects however at times the experience from the students are really bad as well as some teachers who treat children not to the best. Despite this the teachers and school are absolutely outstanding in handling children, introducing them to new things, planning, organization, teaching helping them to learn to use the latest of technology and teaching resources as well as helping them be more independent in life. They also give training to work as a team. The list of training and preparation of future life from this school goes on and on even in a 100 years I can't complete. Such as well being, anti bullying etc.
The bad part of the school is when problems happens. It is in a situation in which everything gets messed up and the wrong people get punished, however it is more of the teachers fault as they do not even investigate, only some bad teachers there are only like two so it is fine.

I love the school, it is like better than home that I would love to move to school and stay for a couple of days. And don't forget the teachers are mostly the best people. This school is 1000000 times better than the KHDA as the children sometimes do bad stuff to reduce the rating of the school. In my opinion it is better than any other school in UAE.

Highly recommended!

Moved my son here after a bad experience with another school in Dubai and it made such a massive difference in his growth and learning. Massive thanks to Ms. O'Mahony for being an exceptional educator in every possible way.

The leadership also really care about students and parents, taking the time to actually listen to concerns and address them, no matter how big or small. There's also a great international vibe to the school - where different cultures and identities are celebrated. Can't wait to see what NAS's primary experience will be like for my boy - Thank you team NAS :)

We applied for our children to go here. They got places but at the last minute I had to work in Abu Dhabi instead. The application process was easy and slick. The school were friendly and responsive. They gave us our deposit back even though they didn't need to. A very good experience even though we never attended or visited the school. Our friends highly recommend it.

A great school with lots of Facilities and different areas of learning. It follows the I.B curriculum and has good education however some teachers need to be paid attention to as they aren't the most welcoming which isn't good for student mental health. Overall a very good average international school.

My kids are studying here and I must say that the school lacks in so many things and my main concern is when they don't listen to parents requests like other schools are catering in dubai.. I have twins and I have been requesting them and I met the primary head personally to put them in one class because of many reasons. One, if something is going on in one's class and other doesn't have.. and then there are cries and fight after school.. 2, if one has different sports team and there's one parent available then the parent is jumping here and there to cheer them both.. 3, one has swimming one day and other other has on another day.. the principle asked me to talk it out with the teacher and teachers they make sure they convince you to the point you realise that there's no point in explaining this to them because they simply don't care and when you go again to the principal, she would calmly say, dear I think it's better to listen to the teacher 😒 so I felt like a ping pong ball.. so teachers know the best for your kids but the parents don't know a thing.. that's what I got the message from them. So the next year they again sent them to different classes but since now it's covid 19 and I opted for (thank fully so ) online classes so they are having the same timings and are studying with the same teacher.. now can someone tell me why don't i have a different online teacher now... ? Where's the so called theory of they being independent when they are apart and have different everything ? Strange and now seems baseless for teachers to put up this point... we get transferred alot and for twins they hate each other so even if they are home they always fight and play separately so there's no point of making them independent just during the class.... this bubble system is also very strange too, i can't send my twins since they kept them in different bubble timings again not considering how difficult it can be for a parent... not keeping in consideration that how will one parent who has to go to office as well.. will drop one kid at 8 and the other at 10 and then pick that kid up at 1 & simultaneously he manages his work as well .. not everyone has a driver... if the school has this expectation...

Ps.. I got a reply from the school here but I was never reached and it's nov 2020 that I edited my review again. So just understand how concerned they are.
(2023)
I am back in school, as we moved back to dubai 2023. It's sister school in Singapore was absolutely amazing. They has the most sharp and intelligent teachers there. I wish we were never back here just because of quality education.
So far nas dubai is same. They have mostly digitalised their class works so kids mostly use apps for their class work instead a fine teacher should be teaching them quick mental maths and other stuff. Like indian teachers do. They focus on apps which i downloaded during covid 😏
So if only apps can do better then why are kids being sent to school. Better have AI schools then.
Mismanaged parking. Still after years they couldn't build a better solution for parking. Yesterday I got a prick on my leg from a plant because that's how their parking space is and when you reach to your work and look down to your feet, It's all dusty and sand inside your feet and all over the shoe. The shoes turn white from black.
The parking area is sandy and has pricky plants instead they should make this area a concrete one. This can also cause accidents as the car can skid and hurt someone.

As we look around us for inspiration and ideas, I have seen some of the most amazing drop off and pick up in repton al barsha school. The principal should visit that school and see how a parking looks like. And what parents and students deserve, when they are paying so much at these schools. I wouldn't review but principal's email is blocked. And talking to teachers makes no difference as they are given that much authority to speak to make a change.