Citizens School

The Citizens learning experience focuses on the whole growth of a learner and is built around each child’s unique requirements, giving them the choices to explore themes, expand interests and determine the routes that they want to go on to reach their full potential.

The Citizens campus, program and approach has been thoughtfully curated to re-shape learning, enabling our students to thrive as citizens of the future, by focusing on well-being, imagination, and fun. As a school born out of Dubai and based in the heart of the city, Citizens School shares the spirit, energy, and optimism for what is possible today and tomorrow as we play our part in positioning Dubai as a global hub of learning excellence in a diversified knowledge economy.

Why Choose this Curriculum?

The Citizens schooling experience centers around future proofing students by equipping them with a rich, connected bank of knowledge and skills relevant for the 21st century, through its custom-built curriculum – Citizens Tapestry. Having partnered with Chatsworth Schools group, a leading school group in the UK, to create Citizens’ Tapestry, the curriculum is based on UK National Curriculum and enriched with six key threads – Mindset; Entrepreneur; Health & Wellbeing; Sustainable Leadership; Global; and Digital Literacy – as part of its comprehensive and holistic education system. The curriculum has been co-developed and influenced by some of the world’s leading researchers on education, motivation, and mindsets, as well as cognitive scientists including Dr Carol Dweck, Matthew Syed and John Hattie, Guy Claxton, and Graham Powell.

• Citizens Mindset: Building mindsets is a core part of our learning approach to ensure our students are open-minded, resilient, able to learn from failure and build upon it to succeed.
• Citizens Entrepreneurs: We provide future-focused learning through 8billionideas, an innovative platform that empowers children with vital skills that will lead them to happiness and fulfilment, providing them with transferable skills in entrepreneurship and innovation, which they don’t traditionally learn in schools, and allows students to become self-starters and pursue a career that they’re truly passionate about.
• Citizens Health and Wellbeing: To promote growth and learning, we recognise the need to not only strengthen our children’s physical health but also nurture their mental health, which plays a crucial role in a child’s overall wellbeing.
• Citizens Sustainable Leadership: We help our students to develop a deep understanding of issues that face mankind today and to become responsible stewards of our planet.
• Citizens Global: Our aim is for every child to feel at one with the world in which they live and leave with a deep understanding and empathy for all cultures, creeds, and civilization.
• Citizens Digital Literacy: Using our fully integrated Digital Literacy programme our children will learn to safely and seamlessly use technology alongside traditional methods to enhance their learning, via our measured and innovative approach.

Pastoral Care

Nurturing an environment of wellbeing is fully integrated throughout all aspects of the school and underpins everything that we do with a complete infrastructure of support for children, mentors and the community.

We take a proactive approach in meeting the physical, personal, social, emotional, psychological and academic needs of all of our children. By building trusting relationships, we develop systems of support to ensure everyone has the opportunity to flourish and be happy. The school community is committed to taking responsibility for the children in our care. We have a dedicated Wellbeing Centre, and fully trained mentors, a school nurse and a school counsellor to ensure all children develop as confident, ambitious and joyful lifelong learners.

Through collaboration with local universities, Citizens School will further enable research-based practice in innovative learning spaces to create future thinkers and learners. The collaboration with universities will allow us to provide accredited training qualifications to all Citizens mentors and to teachers of the community as a whole. Additionally, the school also hosts a dedicated well-being centre. The Wellbeing Centre is a purpose-built facility of 1,100 square meters dedicated to supporting the needs of children during their school years and the community as a whole. The centre will provide academic and non-academic support to ensure all children are properly equipped to reach their full potential. This will include providing:

• Additional support for children with learning difficulties
• Wellbeing and mental support for children, teachers, and parents
• Training, development, and outsourcing of Learning Support Assistants

Utilising the UN Sustainable Development Goals and developing children’s understanding of them, Citizens School will also be home to an urban farm. This will be a dedicated space meant to encourage sustainability within the Citizen’s community by growing produce that can be used in our Eco Café.

After School and Co-curricular Activities

es, we do offer a range of after-school activities aimed at encouraging students to go beyond education, to become a part of active learning. We have a wide range of Cocurricular Activities (CCA) programmes open to children of across all age groups. Our activities offer opportunities for engagement in areas of sport, academics, and the creative arts. Our CCA programme is divided into ICA (internal curricular activities) and ECA (extra-curricular activities). 

Parents can sign up their children for activities that are provided by school staff, or our external providing partners. Internal curricular activities will be provided by our own mentors, and they are part of the tuition fees. These will take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 16:00 to 16:45pm. External curricular activities will be arranged for in collaboration with an external partner. Full details of school activities will be sent to parents at the start of each school term, for parents to register their children for the activities of their choice.

The Citizens’ 43,000-square-meter school campus, program and approach have been thoughtfully curated to re-shape learning, enabling students to thrive as citizens of the future, by focusing on wellbeing, imagination, and enabling outstanding outcomes for all young people. We have a 2,900-square-meter open playing and recreation area; a 1,250-square-meter multi-purpose performing arts and activity hall; six lane semi-covered swimming pool and learning pool, football and rugby pitches adhering to FIFA and World Rugby standards; as well as a dedicated dining area for primary school students.

Ratings and Accreditations

The Best Teachers

We believe in becoming mentors to the students and their parents, putting them at the centre of a learning experience which is designed to support a balanced learning lifestyle, allowing them to flourish and be happy in a safe and supportive environment. Our team believes in identifying potential, stimulate passion, nurture talent, and celebrate bravery to incubate the producers, performers, competitors, creators, innovators, and thinkers of tomorrow.

To do so, we select our mentors based on a variety qualifications and advanced skill sets. In the traditional sense, a teacher’s role is to impart knowledge through instruction and explanation via formal subject lessons. Nowadays, children have access to information at the click of a button, so what can a teacher teach a child that they cannot access themselves through the Internet? Therefore, our teachers are aptly named mentors because aside from providing instruction and sharing knowledge, they focus on applying that knowledge in practice, nurturing creativity, and fostering personal development to inspire students to develop their own skills.