Principal (St. Andrew’s School)

The Government is working to build a stronger and more modern and prosperous future. The future of the Bahamas, however, starts today, with the education of the country’s youth. Generally speaking, how would you describe the educational system in Nassau today?

The educational system is obviously mixed. You have public and private and the quality varies as well across the country. I think the best public schools offer a pretty decent education and some of those happen to be in the family islands such as Long Island. But I think the public sector has work to do and in my opinion, I don’t think the public sector has necessarily improved dramatically over the last 20-30 years. So I think that education needs to be at the forefront of government policy and that there needs to be a focus not just on investment but also quality, professional development and international standards. So in terms of the public sector, I think there’s lots of work to be done.

In terms of the private sector, I think again there’s lots of different sectors within the private sector. Just within New Providence, you have Lyford Cay, which I would say is an international school but one that really operates within a gated community. It offers a very good education, has very small class sizes and charges high fees. Then you have what is known as BAISS schools, which are Bahamian associated independent secondary schools but do include some primary schools. They are generally private, independent, Bahamian schools and they work together to a certain extent. Some of them are religious denominations and they have athletics competitions and some degree of professional development amongst the organisation.

With origins that date back to 1948, St Andrew’s is the International School of The Bahamas. In your opinion, what really sets your school apart from other private schools in the country and even the region?

I think that St. Andrew’s has a unique position within the educational system in the Bahamas because we are private, independent, non-denominational, international yet proudly Bahamian and that’s where I think we are different from the other schools in the system. So we are international yet proudly Bahamian - what does that mean? Our curriculum is international. We are an International Baccalaureate (IB) school, which I believe is the best pre-university education that is available anywhere in the world. I think that increasingly research is showing that not just in terms of university pathway but in terms of job prospects and the skills that the particular program promotes. The IB is, to me, the gold standard in terms of international education and we’re also building our curriculum through our IB program in the primary all the way through to secondary to support our IB diploma program. So we are international and are increasingly looking to standardise our curriculum and be able to benchmark our standards against international standards. It’s no longer good enough to say that we are a good Bahamian school, we have to be able to show that we are an excellent international school so everything we are doing in terms of curriculum development and the benchmarking of standards is international and quality but we are proudly Bahamian. So we take part in all of the Bahamian sporting competitions and win a number of them. We take part in things like the National Arts Festival and local service projects so we give back. With St. Andrew’s school comes a responsibility of supporting people who are less fortunate. 65-70% of our students are Bahamian but we also have a fairly sizeable expatriate community so I think that is what distinguishes us from other schools in New Providence particularly. I want to be able to show that we offer the best quality of education available in the Bahamas.

With students of 35 different nationalities, St Andrew’s was the first school in the Bahamas to be accredited to the International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO), the Council of International Schools (CIS), as well as the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC). How have these accreditations benefitted your school and students?

We just last year went through a five-year review, which was excellent so we were re-accredited. We’ve just been through our IB diploma five-year review, which was again excellent. So yes we are internationally accredited by those three organisations and I think that they offer some guidelines to keep the school going on a genuine school improvement road. Obviously they’re a marketing tool for us also as they show that we reach those standards but they also give weight behind the development plan and gives substance to what we are trying to do. When I go out to the community and parents I can say that this is what is expected from a CIS- or IB-accredited school. So it offers a number of benefits, also your network grows amongst international schools. It’s quite a tight community so the senior managers know each other and contact each other with common issues and problems so being part of those looser chains but also those more organised chains I think is very important.

Do you do much work with the Government of the Bahamas?

I have been trying to work closely with the government to create a public private partnership here. I’ve had three conversations with Minister Jerome Fitzgerald who is an alumni of St. Andrew’s School. To me a perfect model would be to try to bridge that gap between private and public so a case in point here is that there are a number of development things that are going on at St. Andrew’s School over the last 15 months. One has been that we developed a school within a school for students with mild to moderate learning difficulties who haven’t been able to find appropriate accommodation in terms of the education system within the Bahamas. So they have been wrongly placed. They may have been in a down syndrome school when they weren’t down syndrome students. These are students who can - even though they have special needs - can access certain parts of mainstream curriculum so I’m very much for a comprehensive, inclusive system as I think it does wonders for everyone involved. So we opened up a unit within our school with a small number of kids and some specialist staff so those kids are part of the curriculum and the St. Andrew’s community. I would love to work with the government on a partnership with that because they could offer scholarships to kids who desperately need that kind of tuition but who can’t afford the fees. We have the land and staffing.

The Ministry of Education has to be more open to a relationship with the private sector. We can offer a lot to the government, for example, on the 26th October we are having a professional development day where we are doing workshops within the school. It seems an obvious thing to me that we would bring in Ministry of Education teachers to experience the quality of workshops that we could deliver here so we can give back to the community.

St Andrew’s is working to fully integrate IT into the school's curriculum. Just this year you introduced the pilot digital literacy program for year six students, with the objective of providing the students with extensive, hands-on experience that is critical to developing life skills and succeeding in the 21st century. How successful has this been?

I think it has been very successful. 27 years in education has taught me a lot in terms of initiatives and IT is an interesting one to me because there have been some success stories along the road I’ve seen and been involved in and some disasters as well that I’ve seen and been involved in. The interesting thing about IT is that it seems obvious that we need to integrate IT into the curriculum but the disaster stories are when lots of funds have been thrown at IT and not much training has gone on. So I have been very much of the opinion that when you develop or integrate you have to roll it out and you have to do it in a systematic and strategic sort of way.

So we rolled out a pilot digital literacy program for year six and we are moving increasingly to the Google suites, which is great for us because it’s free and it does everything that Microsoft does. So we have rolled it out and we are training staff so the roll out has been very successful but it hasn’t been revolutionary. It’s been stage by stage so it gets some traction into specific year groups. My vision of IT is very different to the vision at St Andrew’s previously. When I arrived here last year, the primary school kids used to be taken out of their class and marched through the school to an old-fashioned lab with some desktops and they went there for half an hour, were told how to touch type and then went back to the classroom. We’ve abandoned that model completely. It’s now laptop trollies that go to the classroom and that digital literacy specialists will go into the classrooms and integrate the actual skill into the actual scheme of work in that particular moment of time. So now we see IT as part of the curriculum.

Are you working to incorporate technology in any other ways?

Yes, for example, I teach a year nine group and I set all the homework through Google Classroom and I mark it through Google Classroom. I tell the students if it’s going to be a summative or a formative piece and if it’s the latter, they’ll send it to me and I can give them some feedback before they actually submit it. So we are using collaboration and moving much more to the idea of using technology to track and benchmark our students, so for administrative reasons but linked to classroom practice.

To me, one of the key criteria of a good school is that the students actually achieve beyond the benchmarked potential, so I’m looking for various ways to show that we are actually adding value to the education. Some of that is qualitative of course, it’s the experience in terms of leadership or service but as a parent they want to make sure the results are as good as they possibly could be or even better, so a way to do that is though technology through tracking and benchmark testing. There is some very sophisticated stuff out there, there’s data that actually throws out chances graphs for what kids can achieve in external examinations. That to me is a very useful use of technology to drive up standards within a school as well.

St Andrew’s is a certified eco-school. What exactly does this entail?

We were the first New Providence school to get this. It basically shows our commitment to the environment so recycling, increasing our use of solar panels, and our ability to just show that the environment that we live in is very important and make our stamp on that. It is student-led and every year we have to be reaccredited to make sure that we don’t stop doing what is necessary.

According to your website, St Andrew’s is recognised nationally, regionally and internationally, with many of your graduates going on to study at the world's leading universities, including Harvard. How exactly do you want the school to be perceived both in and out of the Bahamas?

Quality international education. I would like parents who are bringing their children to the school for the long term to think that they are going to get a breakthrough education, which is going to go from pre-school all the way to the end of the IB diploma. It’s a connective up curriculum that makes sense in terms of the skills-based curriculum, which will prepare their children for university of the later life. For parents who are bringing their children in for two or three years, because it’s part of the demographic as well, they can safely know that if they have to relocate to another country that their children can go to the appropriate year group and that they will be flying in those particular schools. I would like it to be perceived as a school that develops 21st century learners and leaders of tomorrow, and a lot of different things that link back to our vision and mission, which are not different from any other decent international school.

Does the school have any plans to expand? If so, what are they?

There are challenging times ahead for schools in the Bahamas. The challenges lay with the economy, our fees are beyond the means of many parents within the Bahamas even though they aren’t the highest on the island. So even if parents know St. Andrew’s is quality education, unless they get a scholarship, they are going to find it impossible to bring their children here. There are also challenges with expatriates that relate to the economy. There are not as many expatriate families here now as there were five years ago due to changes in the banking industry.

We are about 650 now, if we had around 700 I think that would be where we would want to be. I would look at a situation where the best marketing tool for school is to say you are full, but a school can be too big or it can be too small, so I think 700 students would be the optimum level. To get to 700 is going to be a challenge, so the only thing that we can do is to show that we are the best school in the Bahamas. If we can show this, we are doing our job and then parents will make the choice, can they make the sacrifice to bring their kids to St Andrew’s? If we can show that we offer this top quality international education that is proudly Bahamian and they live out west and have to face a 40-minute drive to school, they have to make that judgment call and decide if it is worth it. So that constantly reminds me to show that we are the best school in the Bahamas and that we are a school that is interested in school improvement and one that is constantly developing into certain areas and improving the quality of what it is delivering.

Mr Stitch, on a more personal note, you have more than 25 years of experience in education, having worked in England, Hong Kong and the Bahamas. You were appointed Principal last year - what legacy do you hope to leave during your tenure at St Andrew’s?

I would like to be able to deliver on the tagline that I mentioned at the beginning that we are international yet proudly Bahamian. So I would like it to be able to see that during my tenure with my current team that we can show that our kids can be benchmarked against international students worldwide and that they can compare and show themselves as being academically at the top level. To continue with the proudly Bahamian is something that resonates with me as I find it to be very different.

The other tagline we are using increasingly is that we cherish the past and embrace the future. The cherish the past and embrace the future is, when I first came to this school 15 months ago and I spent the first couple of days with stakeholder groups, I asked what is it about St. Andrew’s that you really cherish and if we would make changes, what would you like to hang onto? They all talked about community, relationships, responsibility, the history of the school and those things that are deeply engrained in what St. Andrew’s is all about. Some of the things you can really feel around the school are the relationships between our staff and our students. They are very strong, more casual than you would see in a public school but casual in a very positive way. The kids would come to the teachers at break time, knock on their doors and ask questions and for help. There is a really good vibe between staff and students so it feels like a big community, we have a community in the school. So that is what I would like to hold on to but we have to move forward and I had the feeling when I came to St. Andrew’s School that this was a school that was always cherishing the past but wasn’t necessarily embracing the future, which is the idea of digital literacy. We are introducing mandarin in two years, joining up our curriculum, moving towards international standardization and that’s all about embracing the future but still holding on those things that makes St. Andrew’s unique in its own way.

We have a mission and vision but these are two statements that we are increasingly using on our website and in terms of our communication and I think that they really encompass what we are trying to do with the school. So it’s not my legacy, I think it is the legacy of developing the school and that it is a team effort. I want to create teams that would buy into this kind of vision and then it becomes the vision of the community rather than the vision of the principal.

I would also like, because as I mentioned earlier that I am very much a supporter of inclusive education, to develop alternative pathways, non traditional academic pathways in the school, more career related pathways maybe ones that lead students directly into the hospitality business, into leisure and tourism, because not all students are academically gifted and not all of them can cope with the IB diploma, so to be able to follow through with a school within a school model and to develop that through the curriculum to offer inclusive opportunities to our students which are internationally worthwhile I think is something.

There is a great book I read by John Collins called “Good To Great.” He looked at a number of businesses that had plateaued really. They had been successful but never took that step from being good to great. He then looked at businesses that had made that lead and he uses this analogy of this big flywheel of change. Basically youintroduces some major ideas and once you get a little traction amongst the stakeholders groups, you start to get that flywheel moving and some momentum. For us the flywheel was opening a school within a school. If I had said we would do it a year ago and we didn’t do it, that flywheel would have stopped. We have moved the school shop and opened the coffee shop here, which is big PR thing, but I said that I was going to do that last year and I think people thought no he is not. So they may not be massive things but once you start to get a little traction and that momentum moving then hopefully we are moving from a very good school to a great school.

The readers of Harvard Business Review include many of the world’s most influential business and political leaders. What message would you like to send them about The Bahamas and St Andrew’s?

This is a beautiful country, a fantastic place to live and a land of opportunity. It’s a time now where we are hopefully on the cusp of something great. This depends on a number of things and public and private organisations sharing the vision to move the country forward. The potential of the Bahamas is a little bit untapped and hopefully this can be tapped in the future.

In terms of St. Andrew’s, if you are considering moving to the Bahamas, this is the best school in the country because we offer something that no other school offers. We are different than any of the other school and I think all parents should look at what we offer: international yet proudly Bahamian, inclusive and the students that we produce are world-class and are successful wherever they go. We offer an experience that our students enjoy whether it be for 16 years that it takes to go from pre-school to the end of the IB diploma or just tapping in the school for two or three years because of the expatriate movement. This to me is the best school in the Bahamas.