Dear Family,

We hope you are enjoying the summer. We know that many people are not in Dubai at present as they are spending time travelling and with their families.

At The Aquila school our team are working hard to ensure that everything is ready when we welcome our vert first Aquila children – which is just one month from today.

We will be offering a wide range of CAS activities (mostly after school, some before school) that aim to introduce children to potential hobbies, develop skills in sports, encourage learning of new languages, and inspire an interest in areas that perhaps they would not be exposed to through their day-to-day learning. Therefore we are delighted to announce our partnership with the ICC Cricket Academy, who will be our school provider for our cricket activities.

Over recent months we have spoken to many families about all aspects of our school – and in most conversations we come back to our core beliefs. Firstly, we always say that the care, safety and supervision of the children is the number one priority of everyone in school. With this in mind this week we have been finalising the access and security arrangements for the school. If your child is already enrolled please remember to let us have your pass application form back so we can get your passes ready. For the safety of all of our children we will not allow anyone on site without a pass. Secondly, we talk about school connectedness – and how we will work hard to ensure children are safe and happy in school and love coming to school. Thirdly – we talk about how we Refer us to your Friend Now! happy in school and love coming to school. Thirdly – we talk about how we make learning engaging and relevant and ensure that – regardless of their starting point – every child makes as much progress as possible. Alongside this, we will ensure that as a school – we keep in regular contact with families and ensure that families know what is happening in our busy school. To facilitate this – we are using an app called Schoolzine. This is already set up – although it has very little content yet – and will include future newsletters, letters about school events and our school calendar. If you want to be ahead of the game, you can download it now – just search for Schoolzine or the SZ app in the App store, under Middle East search for Aquila and then select the year groups you are interested in – or the whole school (FS and Primary) if you want to have a whole school view of what is going on. You will then be able to see what is added in the coming weeks and be up to speed when we open! From 30 August our weekly newsletter will be published via the app.

We know that there are many schools here in Dubai – so – to help out future plans – we would be really grateful if you could spend one or two minutes completing our very short survey – there is only one question – to help us understand why you have chosen our school for your children. The survey can be accessed by clicking this link.

Finally – due to increasing roles – we have a vacancy for a class teacher and additional learning assistant with a UK teaching experience. If you are interested, please contact us at principal@theaquilaschool.com