Will Brehm  0:16
Nidal Al Haj Sleiman, welcome to FreshEd.

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  1:13
Hi, Will. It’s great to be here on FreshEd today.

Will Brehm  1:16
Congratulations on your new article. I really enjoyed sort of learning about internationalization in some schools in Qatar and in the UK. But maybe to start, it would be really good to define and describe what we even mean by international schools’ sort of in general.

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  1:34
In fact, there’s no single definition that could describe international schools due to the huge diversity amongst them, but they could still be described in general as; schools teaching a non-local curriculum. So, a curriculum that’s different from the host country’s curriculum. They generally teach the curriculum in English, fully or partially, and are mostly led and managed by Western staff, Western leadership. So, these schools generally host international students, or both international and local students. And however, there have been recently, some exceptions in the Middle East where there are some new schools that started teaching the IB program in Arabic, while also teaching English and other foreign languages. But the vast majority of these schools, of everything that’s known as international schools teach in English in addition to another language.

Will Brehm  2:24
Are these schools mostly sort of elite schools? Like high fee schools? Like the IB, I think of sort of as an elite sort of thing. Is that how international schools usually are described?

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  2:37
Traditionally, yes. They used to cater for the children or serve the children of the wealthy communities, middle-class communities or more lately, aspiring middle-class families. However, there recently has been what Mary Hayden classified as Type C schools that are the schools that are more commercial, that target a socioeconomic group that is not that wealthy or not elitist, but more like aspiring middle-class. So, there are now -and that’s why I mentioned the diversity of international schools- there are now different tiers or different groups of international schools, but in general, most of them are described as multicultural, and they have a higher rate of mobility and transience amongst the community. So, also, it wouldn’t be unusual to say, for example, that there are commonly dominant cultures in different schools depending on their management and style. And this is by large Western, Anglo, European.

Will Brehm  3:33
And so, this idea that these are multicultural schools that also have sort of transient populations, are the transient populations, both students and staff?

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  3:42
Definitely. Leaders, teachers, staff, and students. And the two dominant themes in my PhD research were mobility and transience, and then multiculturality. And the way the school has kind of responded to that, or probably not responded to that was also something that was problematic.

Will Brehm  4:03
And you touched on this just briefly, but why did international schools first emerge?

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  4:08
That’s a very interesting question that I think was kind of worthy of some historical research from my side and my thesis. So, the phenomenon of international schools obviously is not recent. We know from historical studies that different religious or missionary groups in the 19th century traveled to different countries or colonies to teach their people and kind of spread their ideologies or specific faiths groups. And however, generally after World War Two, the number of Western personnel and later communities started moving to different countries as political and diplomatic delegates, or as colonial troops or through international trade agreements, or simply to start up new businesses. And that was mainly in Asia and Africa. So, the term “International School” started to be known quite a long time ago, but then in the late 1960s, with the development of the United World Colleges that were also known as United World Atlantic Colleges. The first one started in Wales, and then they spread to different countries, and later also, I think the IB started about the same time, in about the 1968 IB program. So, it was kind of the emerging. It was a new phase of international education or international schools. And this obviously increased with the development of the European market, and later the EU where many delegates and communities moved across Europe and the UK. And each community needed a school that would teach the children and kind of preserve their culture and language. So, in the 1970s, the wave of international schools grew massively towards the east and the Global South context, such as Western governments, corporations, where they saw potential markets. So, they kind of sent or directed educational organizations to invest or explore new contexts where there are potentials for the corporation. So, it was kind of both a cultural and economic benefit for them. And obviously, all of these groups, they needed schools to educate their children. And then later then about the late 1990s and early 2000, they started more and more targeting local communities.

Will Brehm  6:08
Right. I feel like when I was in my master’s program, I did a little bit of research on some international schools in Europe, and how a lot of them it was like the American School of Warsaw, or the British School of whatever. And then in that 1990s, period and 2000s, they started changing their name to the international school in Warsaw, and International school, and they sort of started removing that British or American name. So, in this sense, is that because they started trying to target more local communities, population students?

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  6:43
Absolutely. And some schools in Qatar did the same.

Will Brehm  6:47
Right. Okay. And so, at that point, it was less about educating students who might be the children of diplomats, or the children of business owners, or businesspeople in those different countries and more about educating the local population, say, in Qatar, or in Poland?

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  7:04
Or opening up to attract a wider scale of clientele.

Will Brehm  7:09
Okay, and who would those people be?

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  7:10
Generally, everyone who could afford them. They gained kind of what they call a prestigious reputation, and they started becoming more competitive, and they invested in their marketing campaigns. And generally, with the rising mode of mobility and the transnational capitalist movement, especially for people from Europe who were kind of moving for better opportunities or for jobs across Europe or moving to global destinations for more better opportunities, or more options. The clients or the people who move towards international schools started increasing, increasing, and obviously the last 20 years have witnessed immense increase in the size and number of those who are hosted by international schools.

Will Brehm  7:53
Has anyone tried to actually like quantify that number like that increase?

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  7:57
Yeah, definitely. I refer to this, I think in my thesis. I use the statistics of the international School Services, which is a commercial, but widely reliable source that different academics usually referred to. There are millions of students, I think about 13,000 schools globally and they host millions of students and hundreds of thousands of teachers, and the number is wildly growing.

Will Brehm  8:23
Wow. It’s a huge phenomenon. So, in this latest paper, you really dove into looking at international schools in England, as well as Qatar. So, could you just sort of give a brief historical overview of the international schools in those two locations, and how some of that history might be different?

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  8:43
Yeah, I think that’s a really important aspect of the contextualization of my research questions in general. So, I’m going to start by speaking a little bit about how that trend increase in England, and then move to Qatar and kind of link it to the historical relationship between both countries. So, Britain’s move towards global markets took place through a significant ideological shift as policy narratives, usually by the 1990s started to encourage global investments education included. So, it was seen as more investing in the educational sector and that also was influenced by the rising discourse of privatization in England. And they also encouraged partnerships with global entities, encourage British independent schools to prepare their students -not only independent schools, actually, there was a trend of where all schools in England were encouraged to prepare their students to be workers and investors in the future global economy. And that discourse -maybe some people will remember like, maybe we can hardly remember a speech of Tony Blair without a couple of words of global, globalization, and globalized economy. And that’s funny, it’s not just kind of a few words that he was throwing, it was an ideology, or it was a shifting ideology. So, the New Labor government with Blair and Gordon between the 1997 and 2010 encouraged English schools to establish ties and partnerships abroad and just across countries, and to grow their global dimension and to encourage international education inside UK schools. So, this shift in foreign policy towards global partnerships, and particularly in educational services encouraged the development of international schools that would attract international students who would come into the UK and also would serve the children of affluent international families living inside England. And I’m saying particularly England because Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland have quite different contexts. However, it’s important to note also that so many independent schools in England -and some of which have overseas branches- have programs that cater for international students and offer at least one of the IB programs and specific services for the students, but these do not identify as international. They promote themselves as traditional English schools, which kind of appeals immensely to wealthy international students. And well, obviously they commodify and market their English as a kind of distinct and highly desirable line of cultural capital.

Will Brehm  11:15
And so, what about Qatar? How do things look there? And how is it slightly different?

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  11:18
Yeah. Well, Qatar -as well as the rest of Gulf States- was a protectorate of the British Empire for about 150 years before ending the protection in 1971 through an agreement that kind of maintained the special economic and cultural relationships. The oil was discovered in Qatar 1937, and a little bit before that in Kuwait, and this led to massive economic and social developments in the whole Gulf region. The gas was discovered later in 1972, I guess. So, this is an important piece of information that I kind of developed significantly in my thesis because of its importance and implications for the sector of education, and particularly international education. So, the oil obviously increased the geopolitical importance of Qatar, and it relates also to the story of British education and the Gulf, and the role played by the British Council back then. So, before the oil phase, the British Empire had one British Council office in the whole region, which was located in Iraq, and they used to send occasionally some delegates to visit Palestine, which was also a British colony and the Gulf states. But in the early 1950s, things started to develop in a different direction. There were political and ideological challenges in the Middle East in general, which led the Foreign Office to establish another British Council in Doha to promote and maintain what they saw as important cultural and educational ties with Qatar. And these changes are quite significant so by that time, by the mid 1950s, or early 1950s, the wells from the oil started to appear amongst Qatari community, as well as other Gulf families. And the whole situation was affected by the Nakba in 1948, when many Palestinian teachers who were dispossessed from Palestine migrated to the Gulf and worked as teachers and doctors. Plus, there was a significant wave of migration from Egypt to the Gulf states, because the Gulf states then have just started their public schooling sector and public universities or national universities. And these were mainly Palestinians and Egyptians. So, the significant presence of these groups have kind of contributed to a form of rising pan Arabism that the British didn’t seem to like at the time. And it was kind of also the early days of the Nazirite movement in Egypt, and the time of the Algerian revolution, the Omani communist movement in Dhofar, and the New Islamic wave in Hijaz, which all of it seemed a bit of like a turbulent movement altogether. So, it seemed to kind of threaten British interests in Qatar. So, by the 1970, the decision has been made by Britain to terminate its official production relation with Qatar and the rest of the Gulf states, but also, they decided to kind of encourage the sheikhdoms in Qatar to establish the first British International School in 1971, which was followed later on by another, and then another, and so on. And nowadays, interestingly enough, despite significant presence of American corporations in the oil and gas industry, and a relatively large American base in Qatar, and you know, a significant American community, American schools are important. However, generally society in the Gulf states still view a British education as of kind of I can describe this as a socially and historically constructed form of quality, and it is still going on.

Will Brehm  14:47
So, the perception is that the British schooling system is of higher quality.

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  14:52
It is. And the number of British international schools in the Gulf is still higher than that of American. But of course, British and other international schools do not mention or teach the colonial histories. They just teach what they teach without any kind of reference to that.

Will Brehm  15:09
Okay, and what you’ve done then is sort of look at a couple of these schools in both England and in Qatar. What’s the student demographic that you found in the schools that you were working with?

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  15:20
I’ll give a little bit about the kind of context about the sample of my research. So, I did work with five case studies, three in Qatar and two in England, but I also did a questionnaire around the same goals and focus areas where 49 head teachers participated, which also gave me a kind of broader perspective about schools in both countries. So, while case studies give me a lot of depth, the questionnaire allowed me to kind of see them. So, in England leadership were mostly British men, with a few exceptions of women leaders. Staff are mostly fully British or British from minority ethnic groups. And students, on the other hand, were mostly international with a few exceptions. One of the two schools had a European majority, while the other had the majority from the SWANA region -that is from South and West Asia and North Africa. On the other hand, in Qatar, the majority of school leaders were white men, also, with a few exceptions. Where the leaders who are an exception were from the SWANA region. So, not Qataris. Teachers were also fully International and mostly Anglophonic -of course, with some exceptions. And the teachers of Arabic and Islamic studies were generally Arab teachers, while support staff were predominantly from different Global South communities. But students were both international and local.

Will Brehm  16:36
And in Qatar, the sort of white men leaders, were they primarily British, or do we know their nationality?

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  16:44
Yeah, I think it’s generally not just British, but generally they are Global North, English-speaking leaders. And that’s a phenomenon that has been documented by researchers studying leadership in international schools in other contexts, such as East Asia or other contexts.

Will Brehm  17:02
And that phenomenon being the gender sort of disparity at the top levels of leadership in international schools.

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  17:09
Absolutely. Yes.

Will Brehm  17:10
So, more men and women, primarily Anglophone.

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  17:13
Yeah. Women are generally at the second level of the school leadership hierarchy. But the top positions are usually occupied by men and white men.

Will Brehm  17:23
Okay. So, the schools you looked at in these two different contexts shared that similarity, but they sort of had a slightly different teacher and student profile. How do you make sense of the demographic differences between the schools or between the contexts in particular,

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  17:36
It’s also important to look at how much significance do these schools comprise in each context. So, in Qatar, for example, international schools are about 50% of the number of schools, whereas in England, those that identify as international schools are just about 4% of the number of schools. And this, of course, reflects the demographics of the country, where Qatar is about 85 to 90% of the population are expats or foreign workers. Whereas in England, it’s not the same. In England, mostly -I’ll mention this a little bit when I speak about students- in England, students refer to themselves as migrants or kind of longer term than they refer to themselves in Qatar. In Qatar, there was that sense of permanent mobility that was kind of so powerful in students’ interviews, for example, as well as teachers.

Will Brehm  17:43
And so, the students and teachers in Qatar, they recognize that they would be on the move again, in a year, two years, whatever it is. It’s just part of life.

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  18:39
Yeah, It’s that status of -for example, in England, the rule is, if you spend a number of years, you kind of become eligible to an indefinite leave to remain. Whereas in Qatar, that’s not the case. There’s only one exception, unless you’re really wealthy and you could gain property of up to a specific amount of money. That would enable you to have a kind of longer term or permanent residence, but that’s really rare. Whereas in England, that’s not the case. So, people could remain, they could come as migrants or as refugees and could remain in England. Whereas in Qatar, nobody remains. Even what is referred to by the schools as locals are not in fact locals because Qataris are the only ones that are locals. Whenever international teachers and leaders refer to other students who are, for example, from the SWANA region or the rest of the Middle East, they refer to them as local because they’re probably Arabs or Muslims. But that’s not the case. There are many communities or groups of students who are not Arabs in the Middle East, or who are not Muslims, but it’s that stereotyping of students that was quite also an aspect that I’ve kind of analyzed in a little bit of depth and quite a questioned that in my thesis.

Will Brehm  19:51
It’s quite interesting to think about how on the one hand in Qatar, it’s sort of as you use the word permanent mobility and it’s a nice word to describe it and then in England schools, it was different. There was more of a stability there, there was more of a permanency of staying in place. How did that difference in teachers and in students, how did that impact the school? Does that manifest inside the schools that you were working with in any way?

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  20:17
One thing that kind of kept stopping me, and I kind of reflected deeply on that aspect is that the mechanisms of governing these schools and the procedures, administrative and structural, mechanisms of how these schools work to educate their students, they’re quite the same, despite the huge diversity in the type and kind of cultural and social elements between the communities. So, it is quite remarkable, I would say how they can have the same -it’s like a prototype that they have the same model. And they kind of apply it in different contexts. So, they do the same thing, literally, but their student communities are massively different, and their teachers are different, and their teachers -not all their teachers, because teachers were mostly English speakers, or British teachers, or Global North teachers, American, Australian, Canadian, in some cases- but in general, all these teachers who come from different backgrounds, different training, different experiences, different backgrounds, they were all kind of teaching in the same way. And the school managed the delivery of its curriculum in very similar ways. And I did not expect that. Obviously, we see the kind of homogenization as recently we see it as a norm, but we don’t really see the depth of it and the impact of it until we do this kind of case studies in-depth. Because in one case study, for example, I looked at, I did group interviews, I did individual interviews, I spoke to leaders at different levels, teachers and high school students, I looked at documentary views, I analyzed school reports and evaluations from Ofsted, or the ISI or other institutions. So, I kind of correlated all these data and I found it really kind of worthy of a little bit more work and inquiry in the field of leadership, international schools, particularly. There needs to be a deeper look into how the schools are responding to their students and how they’re teaching and managing their educational programs.

Will Brehm  22:15
Yeah. I mean, it is quite surprising that there is that homogeneity, and trying to understand exactly why that happens. And maybe that’s for future research to really uncover. It does bring up this issue that you looked at, which is sort of how the very idea of internationalism is understood in these different schools. So, let’s start sort of at the leadership end; how did the leaders of these schools, these primarily white men, Anglophone men, how did they understand internationalization?

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  22:43
It might be shocking to say that, although all the schools and all the leaders I’ve interviewed described their schools as kind of largely international, cosmopolitan. They were very keen on global citizenship and international mindedness or British values, including diversity and mutual respect, and all of these important words. And these were on the websites, and on the documents, and the walls and everywhere in the schools. And also, the students were mostly International. So, leaders were so proud of that diversity. And it’s the first thing and the most important thing that they’ve kind of praised and elaborated on. And I think they probably haven’t given it much thought on what internationalism really means. So, they spoke about the multiple nationalities, they spoke about language programs, they spoke about international travels and excursions, and scoring highly in international exams, and the school’s academic reputation. They also spoke immensely about international days, for example, international events and cultural costumes, and food festivities. And I’m aware that this was kind of important for all of them because it kind of brings together the spirit of being together, and being different, but being also connected. I think everyone was so proud of all of that. I think that’s great. And this is much needed but when we move to discussing how internationalization is reflected in the curriculum and pedagogical practices, the focus shifted more into homogenization, rather than diversity and kind of it appeared as if the key purpose of schools was to maintain the school’s unique identity and being everybody to be a part of it, to meet the organizational goals, expectations and policies. So, the whole discussion of diversity and multiculturality kind of vanished when we spoke about the educational program. Nonetheless, of course, it’s important I would like to mention two particular leaders who showed significant awareness and gave a lot of attention to multiculturality as a key aspect of their schools. And I think that was also something that I referred to in my thesis. Those two head teachers, one in England and one in Qatar described the differences, the different backgrounds, different values, different faiths, and different kind of social norms in their school, but they also saw that as a strength and as a challenge at the same time. And they explained how they tried to model a multicultural discourse and tried to show keenness on recognizing every single individual within their schools and all the groups and embrace the different cultures within their program. And I think that is important. And it’s also something that we could build on and take forward.

Will Brehm  25:28
It’s like, the easy bit is sort of the things you can see that look different, and maybe even sound different. So, languages, the festivals, the people of different colors walking around, right? All of those things are sort of tangible, that you can point to and say there’s diversity, there’s multiculturalism. But when it comes to things like different ways of thinking, and being, the things that you can’t see, that’s where it disappears, right? Like that’s too much, that’s too far. And we have to sort of limit our knowledge to a very particular way and definition of what knowledge is.

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  26:03
Exactly. And because you mentioned knowledge, I would like to point out that we, researchers of leadership, they know -and we know from multiple evidence that school leaders are burdened with multiple dimensions of work that have been over the last couple of decades increasing. So, school leaders worry about accountability, about the school’s digital public image, about managing budgets, or at least contributing to that. They worry about quality, about staff, about resources, about parents and about so many things. And it’s quite complex. And you know, that’s highly evident in research. But at the same time, when it comes to preparation, I think there was a significant gap in the leadership development and preparation programs, particularly addressed to leaders who are going to lead or who currently lead in international schools. Leaders mentioned that they are not prepared to lead internationally. That they kind of use or rely on their expertise and their own personal resources and attributes and engage in different forms of workshops, conferences, and training but there isn’t any kind of preparation to lead in this highly complex, multi-social and multicultural context, such as the schools in which they lead. So, this responsibility here is probably or should be kind of shifted to thinking of those who make the policies about the programs for teacher and leader preparation. And what that means in terms of appointing leaders generally, from Britain, or the US, or Canada, or Australia to go and lead somewhere they haven’t visited, they know nothing about, but they have training by their organization or the organization that owns the school. And they are just told, “Just fulfill this agenda” or to “meet these goals”. And that’s not an easy job but there is definitely a gap. There’s a gap between what they learn, or what they know, and what they do. And the needs -the actual social and cultural needs- of their students. Because we all know that educational needs are to a great extent influenced by social and cultural needs, and they’re not disconnected.

Will Brehm  28:16
So, do the students in these school’s sort of experience this gap? Like how do they perceive this sort of mismatch between the leaders taking, you know, in some senses a rather narrow understanding of internationalization, a rather narrow understanding of sort of the context in which the school is situated, and their lived experiences?

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  28:38
Yes, exactly. I think I’ve pointed out to the teachers’ perspectives and the student’s perspective and my paper. I interviewed high school students who describe themselves as dual nationals or international as they’ve moved across places -and some of them refer to themselves as temporary residents in Qatar, whereas migrants in the case of England- and a few students said that they were relieved when they came to an international school as everyone else was international. So, they were not exceptions. And I would like to quote one of them, who said, “I am happy because I feel supported and welcome here due to being a migrant. Although this is not exactly how the school sees me. It’s mostly students and some teachers” end quote. A few students actually describe their feelings of disbelonging, difficulty to make friends, or to connect with a new place after leaving loved ones behind. Many of them mentioned that they can’t go back to their home countries, and they miss their family and friends, especially those from Syria, Palestine, Sudan and Iran. Whereas other students, European students, or from other contexts that explained their experiences with being for example, Korean and Scottish and how people kind of see one aspect of their identity rather than the other, and how they are kind of stereotyped to fit into a specific category when people just see them for the first time. It was that construction of their own identity and how it’s viewed by others in the school that was really meaningful and mattered to them. The students generally were quite, I would say, critical of the homogeneity in their schools. Most of them explained internationalism in a different way than the other. But some of them described it as the sense of constantly moving and not knowing when to move next. Others, for example, explained internationalism as Britishness, and one of them. I caught her here, she said, “The school celebrates International Day, but this is mostly about Britishness. They don’t see us or our cultures. To them, we need to fit in and that is all”. And I think that’s quite unusual for a student to see themselves as invisible or unseen in their school, which is, I think, they had a lot of courage to speak up this way, and to critically analyze their schools’ dynamics. Other students mentioned that their teachers, for example, are mostly Western, and that there’s rarely anyone who speaks their own language. One of them described being taught narratives that fully contradict the knowledge they learned from their parents and grandparents, which makes them feel either angry at times, and at other times just disinterested in the whole topic or the whole subject. And some of them said that schools and their families equally focused so much on competitiveness and exam scores, and that they feel like they’re not given enough space to develop other social, cultural or art aspects or other kinds of personal elements of their lives.

Will Brehm  31:30
It’s just a really fascinating study that you’ve done, because it shows that gap, it shows the limitations and the narrow understandings, it shows the sort of colonial legacies that live on in some of these schools. But then it also shows that the students are deeply aware of this stuff, right? That it’s not as if it’s just sort of happening and not having an effect, or that these students don’t sort of recognize what’s going on. Like they do recognize what’s going on.

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  31:57
Exactly. I genuinely think Gen Zs are amazing, and they’re making a whole lot of difference in the world. And we all see a lot, especially those who are studying youth movements, those students -high school students and early college students- they are making a lot of initiatives and kind of organizing, whether for climate or other political causes, but we are seeing a lot of change. And I think all of us, including school leaders and teachers, we need to learn from them. Well

Will Brehm  32:23
Well, Nidal Al Haj Sleiman, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. Really a pleasure to talk today and congratulations on your new article.

Nidal Al Haj Sleiman  32:31
Thanks, Will. It was a pleasure for me being here.

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