The Future of British Schools Abroad | A Conversation with Simon Probert

British schools in Asia are booming. There's no doubt about that. But are they actually serving the students in them or just exporting a model from the UK that doesn't quite fit? Well, today's guest has spent 10 years asking exactly that question and his answers are worth hearing whether you're in Shanghai, Seoul, or Surrey.

Hey everyone, I'm Shane Leaning. Welcome to Education Leaders, the chat-topping leadership podcast for school leaders just like you. I'm an organizational coach and in this show I get to know the teachers, leaders, and innovators making a difference in education across the world. This episode is supported by the International Curriculum Association and Teaching Walkthroughs.

Stay tuned to learn more. Now some of you are gonna recognize today's guest. Dr. Simon Probert joined us a few years back to talk about British international schools and that episode got a really, really strong response for you.

He's now executive head at Wickham Abbey Hangzhou in China and he's been a senior leader in mainland China for over a year. A few months ago, he published his new book, The Rise of British International Schools in Asia and today we're gonna dig into some of those things in it. And look, even if you're not in Shanghai or Seoul, even if you're leading a school back in Surrey, I think you're gonna find this one relevant. Simon, it's great to have you back.

Let's jump in. I'm so interested and I write about this in global citizenship and ways we talk and think about global citizenship. Obviously, I explicitly talk about the sense of rooted cosmopolitanism and unrooted cosmopolitanism and the sense that rooted cosmopolitanism is about being based in a sense of place, having a strong sense of place. I think that's really important as opposed to unrooted cosmopolitanism, which is the idea that everything is abstract and you don't necessarily have a sense of identity to find in place, which actually I think can be problematic.

Yeah, but Britishness, I've become really interested in Britishness, obviously it's something I talk about, ways we think about Britishness, not least as an expat who's, in terms of my own reflections, I've been abroad for going on 15, 20 years. And for me, ways we think and talk about Britishness in British international schools has to be more than just basing ourselves on British traditions on a very British school model. I think it's really important that British international schools explicitly reflect upon themselves, their curricula, their culture, their ethos, in terms of the local and Britishness almost representing a space between localised contexts and more globalised contexts, if that makes sense. Yeah, I'd like to unpack that a bit because I think this is something that's fascinated to me after reading your work.

So, are many international schools focused on like kind of global citizenship? Are you saying that that is a problematic term in itself, like being a global citizen? It sounds like there's some stuff to unpack there. I can remember that comment by, at the time, Prime Minister about, you know, being a citizen of the world is being a citizen of nowhere.

And that interested me in the time. I found it very provocative. And at the time I was living and working at a British international school in South Korea, and I thought I was a global citizen. So the idea that suddenly I was being told I wasn't, but at the time that the British government kind of caught me off guard.

Yeah. But actually, now I've come to think that the term global citizenship is problematic. I think we need to think about ways in our schools, not least because the demographic of British international schools, certainly, you know, the current wave of British international schools is focused on local students. We have to think much more about how we give our students that sense of place.

How do we localize our schools? What does that look like? What does that mean? For ways we talk to our staff, actually, as well as ways we talk to our students.

And, you know, I think a sense that our students leave school and they don't have a strong sense of local identity, you know, a strong sense of place. That's very connected with a sense of who they are. You know, going back to the importance of identity, the importance of belonging, terms that we've talked a lot about in the post-COVID world, because during COVID, identity felt more ruthless because we live in these odd online lives where everything was over Zoom, you know, and that's not a world that I think is healthy. Have you seen examples of where this has kind of worked well or what this might look like in practice for a school?

I think working in mainland China, so being in mainland China for 10 years has obviously informed ways I think about this sense of local identity, localized curriculum, globalized curriculum. And I'm highly aware that in international bilingual schools in mainland China, you know, we're at one end of a spectrum whereby we have to, you know, in terms of regulatory context, bring the Chinese curriculum much more into our British curriculum. No, no, that can be challenging for educators, but actually I think it can also be very healthy because I think it genuinely means that we're forced to bring the local culture, the local context into our schools in a way that often isn't the case in international schools. I mean, at the other end of the spectrum, you know, when I was working in South Korea, you know, I was head of history, we had a history curriculum, which was very British.

You know, I can remember teaching the Anglo-Saxons, the Battle of Hastings, the Tudors. And, you know, while I was there, probably my third, fourth year, it took me a while before I really started thinking about these things. We changed the curriculum, we brought in Korean history, went on local field trips. And clearly those experiences were really, really important for our students.

And I genuinely believe that the international schools of now, the international schools of the future, they are ones that confine this balance and this sense of the local, as well as this outward looking sense of the global, you know, preparing our students to study abroad, you know, to have the soft skills network globally, to be bridges between nations, but the sense that they are from a nation. I guess that's where I'm coming from. And that's kind of the way that I think conceptualize this. Yeah, it makes sense.

And I think you link it to this idea of belonging as well, almost like that both students and staff feel like belong. Have you seen practices that help within that context that you just described, feel like you belong in that community? Yeah, it's really interesting. Just flipping that over, I've read a few accounts by alumni of international schools and this sense that going through an international school, they finished school, and they didn't necessarily have a sense of belonging beyond the school.

You know, I've read of students having kind of this identity crisis post-school, because perhaps at school, perhaps they had a sense of belonging to that community, but they didn't have a broader sense of belonging to place, you know, to nation. Having said that, in this post-COVID moment, ways that we conceptualize and understand belonging in schools has been something that we talk about a lot. And I think it is important that we can articulate what that looks like in our schools. For me, at the core of everything, and obviously I write about this, you know, is this sense of community, having a community which truly represents the values, the aspirations, potentialities of all of its members, both in terms of the students, but also the parents, and also what we bring the staff to those communities.

But within that community, you know, I write about traditions as British schools, I think formal rituals of school life, like assemblies, you know, like how we frame pedagogy in our schools. School uniform, you know, these are all symbols, you know, they can be performative of ways that we understand conceptualized belonging. But at the same time, I do think that sense of belonging also needs to represent belonging to the broader community, which they're part of, the broader local community. And even for third culture kids, I'm a strong believer in having a sense of place.

The idea, and I feel this very strongly as an expat, that I have multiple senses of place. You know, I've lived in China now for many years, but I can never be Chinese. But there's a sense in which my sense of place belonging within China is just as strong as my sense of place and belonging in the UK. And I think that's really important.

And again, I think that shows the complexity of these conversations around identity and belonging. It's really complex. And I'm reflecting on your experience as well, because now I think you've kind of made me think about myself in that you said you used to think you were just a global citizen of the world. And I think me and my wife, we talk about that as well, but I'm wondering now, is that quite a problematic message to give to students because we could be setting them up to feel like they've got no ground beneath the feet?

Because where is that? It doesn't actually exist. Yeah, I think the sense that our students have this outward looking perspective on the world. Obviously, we talk a lot about SDG in school.

That's really important. But simultaneously, I think being a global citizen, I mean, obviously in the same way that perhaps expat is a term that can be loaded with privilege. I think the term global citizen is also a term that is loaded with privilege. And you know, thinking about language too, obviously, going back to identity belonging, language has an absolutely critical role in this.

Language is the key vehicle for culture. A global citizen, is that someone who speaks English? Can you be a Mandarin speaker, but not an English speaker from being global citizen? I mean, of course, the answer has to be yes, but I think there's certain ways that we think conceptualize that term, which perhaps are unhelpful.

And I think at the very least, we have to unpick it. And I don't think it's enough for schools just to say, we promote global citizens. And I think it's very simplistic to do so. Yeah, and can be tokenism, can't it?

But at the same sense, and I know people are gonna really enjoy the ideas in your book, but it does also feel like a bit of a minefield in terms of kind of figuring this out as a leader. And you talk a lot about culturally responsive leadership, cultural intelligence for a leader. And that's so important in an international school, a British international school abroad. So I wonder what things leaders can do to actually become effective in this context.

It seems so complex to me and might feel a bit abstract. I'm fascinated by culture, you know, how we think about culture, how we talk about culture in our schools. I talk about Parmit Rosa, who writes about the uncontrollability of culture and the complexity of culture. And that's something that endlessly fascinates me, you know, the sense that I can sit with my team, I can sit on my own and reflect upon what is Chinese culture, what is British culture?

But I think the reason that I've come so interested in this area is that it's so complex and there are no easy answers. The culturally responsive piece then, you know, again, I'm relatively young, certainly as a head, but I certainly moved to a place in my career where I was talking all the time. I was telling people what I thought, but I think it's incredibly important as leaders. When we're working in international schools, even more so when we're working with local students, it's so important that we stop and we listen and we understand and we make space.

And there always is space. And that sense of pause, of reflection is incredibly important. Because as I write about, you know, coming to China back in 2008, I had a sense that Chinese culture was this and it was this. And obviously for many of our teachers, it's their first time in China, you know, they will have perceptions of Chinese culture.

But in reality, China is so complex and culture isn't monolithic. And even though, you know, studies that perhaps give us generalizations about a particular culture, they tell us something and that something might be helpful, but it's also misleading because the complexity of culture means you have to stop and pause and listen and connect with localized context and with individuals rather than collectives. That resonates so much for me. And I think dealing with many leadership challenges, not least culture, dealing with complex culture, especially in international schools, stopping, pausing, reflecting is super wise advice.

So this podcast, we've got many leaders around the world leading in international schools and many of them will probably find that they're in a situation of co-leadership of some sort, like, you know, where they've got maybe expatriate, if we were to call them expatriate leaders and local leaders working together. Could you share some of your reflections about how this might work in practice to make it succeed? I mean, firstly, I always come back to the fact that leadership's about people. It's about relationships.

It's about understanding the people you're working with and developing trust, developing collaboration. I think co-leadership models in international schools are really important. It's something in mainland China that probably is more common than elsewhere in the region. And again, I think that's the compliance and regularity context.

I think it's something that we will continue to see the growth of those elsewhere in the region because I write about, and this is something that I truly believe in. I think the model we see in China, where we have far more co-leadership, where we have far more localization, is the future of the international school market. Explicitly on co-leadership, I mean, it's something that we do here. It's something I've experienced kind of in the past.

You have to be really reflective. And I think you need to work with people who are really reflective. Well, as a leader, you get things wrong. In a co-leadership model, there's an ideological belief that you are gonna make decisions together and that those decisions have to be aligned.

And this is something that continues to challenge me even now on a daily basis. And I guess that's why I write about it because it fascinates me. Again, it's about time. It's about understanding.

It's about collaboration. But in many ways, it's much more challenging than working individually and being able to make all the decisions on your own back, so to speak. But actually, it's very powerful. I think the acknowledgement that at the heart of great schools is collaboration between cultures and that you see that at all levels of the school is really, really important.

I mean, I talk to our staff about ways I want them to model the same behaviours they want our students to exhibit. If I can truly model in my school as a leader with my broader leadership team, the sense of co-leadership, the sense of collaboration between people from different cultural contexts, I think that's incredibly powerful for all the work that we do with the students in our schools. Leaders tell me all the time that they struggle to find a practical way to get evidence-informed practice into every classroom. And that's where Teaching Walkthroughs come in.

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From my perspective, I've worked with many different leaders and I find that this co-leadership model or collaborations for some leaders is just incredibly difficult. And you've alluded to the challenges yourself. And yet it's interesting you say you feel that that is actually the future of international schools. Tell me more about that because I think some leaders will be listening and go, while I'm struggling to make this work, why would you say it's the future?

Certainly as a British educator working in British schools, you see we focus on values, we focus on character, we focus on what traditions say of British education mean in our context. But at the same time, we have to find ways to localize all of those things. And if I'm making decisions based on my understanding of education, which inform more than anything by the UK, then I'm going to make decisions that might not be the best decisions for my students and for my community, bearing in mind that the vast majority of the students in the schools that I've worked at, and this is the case broadly in terms of the growth, the ongoing growth of the British sector are from much more localized context, they're not from the UK. And we have to make sure, as I will say to co-leaders, I'm not Chinese, I can never, no matter how long I live here for, have the same cultural understanding of China, of the local context, of pedagogy from a Chinese perspective, that a local leader can.

And I have to bring my expertise, my understandings to this school as a British leader, which are ultimately informed by British education to the table in the same way I really need the perspectives from local leaders of the cultural context in which we operate. I mean, my belief that pedagogy is a cultural activity, but I believe strongly that our approaches and understandings of pedagogy, they're informed by the cultural context which we've come from, not least because we all view school, at least partially through the lens of our own experiences. So when I'm talking to our parents about pedagogy, when we're thinking about what fantastic math teaching looks like, bearing in mind, the majority of our math teachers are from a more localized educational context, ways and insights they can give me on their approaches to math teaching are really important. At the same time, we're teaching GCSEs and A-levels, so that also has to be informed by ways on what we consider to be the best teaching in GCSEs and A-levels globally.

Do you reckon their foreign international school leaders have it harder? Um, yeah. It sounds it. I think it's different, and I really believe if you're working in terms of education, going back to this cultural intelligence, you have to be interested in the cultural context in which you're operating.

The work on cultural intelligence goes back to kind of 20 years ago. One of the four dimensions is motivation, and this sense, according to the research, with every culture that you move to, your motivation to learn about that new culture gets a bit less. But it's obviously a problem in the sense that if you are skipping from school to school to school, the research would suggest, this might not be what's happening in practice, that you're becoming less interested in actually engaging with every new cultural context which you're encountering. But my belief is, you know, that we need leaders who are really interested and fascinated and enriched by the cultural context locally, nationally, regionally, in which they're operating.

And if that's not the case, it compromises our ability to work with our communities. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because running a school is just a collection of human beings and the cultures that they're from. And you need to have some, at least a minimum level, some empathy of where they're at and then build from there. I wonder if we can then dig into that level.

So we just talked about leadership, but thinking about your staff, like the staff that you've got on your team and in international schools, the common thing is you're gonna have local staff, you're also gonna have international staff. So do you have any thoughts on how a leader can build a more inclusive culture in that challenging context? So firstly, I think the culture in any school has to be dictated by the leadership team. And I think it's really important as school leaders, we are intentional about what that culture looks like and we can talk about it on a school level, on a community level, but also on a more granular level.

Having said that, here we set up our teams. So we have everywhere in the school, alongside co-leadership, we have teams which have both local and expat staff as part of them. So even in our English team, for example, it's led by an expat leader, but then within the team, we have local staff and expat staff. And I think it's important that we explicitly create contexts in which we bring our staff together because it helps to bridge the cultural divide.

Having said that, this is an ongoing challenge for us. There are lots of contexts in all of my experiences in all the schools I've worked at where I've seen local staff and expat staff not necessarily engaging with each other. I write in my book about informal spaces, informal occasions, really simple things like trying to make sure your staff social calendar has events that will attract local as well as expat staff. It's not just the classic, let's all go to the pub on a Friday night, for example.

That's so true. Which might engage one group of staff, but not the other. Thinking really carefully about what on a staff level, as well as a student level, your informal spaces look like around school and how you're setting up those places to bring staff from different contexts and cultures together. And that's something for any international school.

There's a classic thing in international schools, more traditional international schools say, where you have a more diverse student population and more diverse staff body, that you will still find groups of individuals with the same linguistic groupings coming together and ways to try and break that down. And again, being explicit about how you do that and what that looks like, and trying to create contexts where that kind of evolves naturally because you have people from different cultures working together. I'm almost thinking, as you're saying, that actually that's not just good advice for bringing cultures together, but actually just different groups within your school. I mean, I was speaking to someone who was talking about women in leadership and the same talking about a social where that social time was actually quite late that they'd arranged and that this person said, well, I think many moms here would have preferred to be catching up with their kids and this is so they're missing out.

So I think as a leader, you've got to be really thinking very carefully about the communities, the cultural communities, but all those other kind of communities that exist in your school and working out how do you navigate and include them so that you don't end up with pockets, I guess. Yeah, definitely. Because I mean, in China, in our context, you've seen, right? Like there's as many schools where sadly, two streams can set up in the school.

The school can literally be operating in two streams because no one's thought about how to bring that together. Have you experienced that? It's something I think a lot about on a personal level, both in terms of how I see our own school, there's always more we can do to bring our cultures together and equally how we think across the sector. I'm really interested in what education looks like in a local school.

What is that offering? I mean, in the sector now, certainly in age, there's lots of schools that are private schools, maybe quasi-international, but actually much more local schools as opposed to schools which are much more international or British in their ethos and values. The differences between those things, the relative strengths of those different models is something that really does challenge me. When you end up with two streams, you almost end up with two different schools.

You end up with a sense. And students will say this, they have a Chinese identity, they have a Westernized identity, having a Chinese name, an English name. And it's important that they have a single cohesive identity that is rooted in a sense of place, but it gives them the skills to be at one minute having a conversation in Mandarin with Chinese students and another minute having a conversation in English with the same students and another minute chatting to, maybe we've got an overseas group but they're going on a trip visiting the school. And I think the ability to float between those different contexts is reliant that we are creating this sense of a hybrid culture in school.

Well, that's natural rather than creating two different schools and two different systems, which I don't think is healthy for the community. And what's good, I guess, if you can get that right, you're not just helping now in terms of creating this inclusive environment, but what an amazing skill set for those students to have to be able to live in those spaces. And I would assume that a student who can kind of master that setting is likely to have much greater success in this kind of global world when they leave school. Yeah, I mean, you used the words empathy earlier and going back to the SDGs, the mission of international education as being about promoting peace, bridges between nations.

I think in the modern world, which feels much less uncertain, going back to my own education, when I was a kid, actually as schools, our role are even more important than others. It's one of the few areas where we have this growth in kind of more globalised organisations at a time when in the business world, at least in the NGO world, many of those things seem to be cutting back. And I think that puts us in a unique and really important position as global educators, because we are working with the young people who will be the ambassadors of the future. We're developing people who, albeit the majority of our students are Chinese, but they will be the people who can go abroad and have the soft skills, the empathy, the understanding, you know, to be the bridge builders in a time where, you know, we're seeing bridges falling down.

And I think ideologically as British educators and as British schools, that's a great thing and a great opportunity for us and something that, you know, every day that I'm in school excites me. And challenges me at the same time. I love your passion. I'd love to finish off to hear a little bit about your hopes if you don't mind, Simon.

So, like, if you don't mind me indulging you and quoting something from your conclusion in your book, you say, as Jacob's argues in the case of great cities, great schools must demonstrate success in multiple domains and reinvent themselves to suit new challenges and contexts. I wonder what your hope is around this reinvention of schools you talk about. So, going back to my sense of Britishness and how we think about Britishness, I think Britishness is about reinvention. You know, I talk about Stuart Hall in my book, who's writing about that in the culture of being someone from the West Indies living in London in the 1970s, 1980s.

I think the success of British schools and of our sector depends on, and this is my hope, its ability to reinvent itself and to reinvent what British education means and looks like in international context globally. And I truly believe the schools that flourish will be those who can localise themselves in their communities, and I think that's what Britishness is, that's what Britishness means, and the schools that are flourish and are here in 50 years' time, 100 years' time, they'll be the ones that do that and they'll be able to say, yes, we're British, but we're also local. And by being those two things, we are providing the best education for our students in the world. Wow, what a conversation.

That idea of rooted cosmopolitanism is going to sit with me for a while, I reckon. Just picturing that image of students finishing school without a clear sense of where they belong, well, that's not abstract, is it? It's a leadership problem we can actually do something about. One thing to take away, I think, is to look at your school honestly and ask where the local culture genuinely shows up, not as a token gesture, but structurally, in your curriculum, in the rituals, in who your events are actually designed for.

That two-stream problem that Simon was describing, well, it doesn't happen overnight. It happens through small decisions made quietly over time. If you're interested, you can find the links to Simon's book and where to find him online in the show notes. Education Leaders is hosted by me, Shane Leaning, thanks to the show editor, Pete McGill, production assistant, Skylar Rose-Sturman, and for the original music by GMA Silver.

And thank you so, so much as ever for tuning in today. If we don't speak before, I'll see you here next week. If you're interested in learning more about teaching walkthroughs or the International Curriculum Association, check out the links in the show notes.