Born of the founders’ belief that the only defense against the world is a thorough knowledge of it, Beacon Education is the living proof that sound ideas, if defended and pursued, can shine brightly and guide everyone. These four ‘musketeers’ or defenders of firm educational principles did not want to live to regret their silence and eventually put their money where their mouth is.

Beacon Education is the brainchild of Ziad Azzam, Helal Almarri, Waleed Almokarrab Almuhairi and Dr. Mustapha Khemira, a close knit circle of friends and former colleagues at the Dubai offices of McKinsey & Company, a prestigious management consulting firm. “In the early days, the firm focused on working with the governments in the region, where many of the problems faced by the Gulf Cooperation Council countries (GCC) boiled down to lack of proper infrastructure and education was part of that,” Beacon CEO Ziad Azzam said.

A six-year stint at Choueifat High School as a teacher, curriculum advisor and, eventually, school principal at the tender age of 26, helped Azzam develop a deep-rooted passion for education. His time at McKinsey was meant to open his horizons “but I knew I would always come back to education; it was always in the back of my mind.” Fueling his passion and that of his partners were the projects they worked on for the governments of Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE, dealing with reform strategies related to education. Having developed quite a bit of expertise, the foursome would joke about building a ‘beautiful’ and ‘fantastic’ school. “It was a joke,” says Azzam “but there was some reality behind it and in 2003 we all made the decision to leave McKinsey.”

According to the company’s policy setter Azzam, Beacon’s objective is two-fold. The first is to provide studs dents in the Middle East with an education that is equal to the best education anywhere in the world. “We do that by making sure we invest heavily in the curriculum, and the people who deliver it, i.e. the teachers,” Azzam says, adding that “the second objective defines the strategic direction of Beacon which is to create real impact in the educational landscape.” Lofty second goal? Yes, and Azzam admits that in three years Beacon hasn’t made a dent in this long-term ambition “but we are certainly on our way.”

But what niche was Beacon targeting with all the investment already in education? “For a very long time, the UAE, particularly Dubai, had suffered from a lack of good schools to the point that expatriates, especially Europeans were sending their kids to boarding schools back home,” Azzam says. He adds that alts though certain centers of excellence existed in some private schools which were typically enclosed and not accessible to everybody, GCC schools “still have a large gap to bridge.”

But Azzam is happy that education is on everyone’s mind now. “This should have happened 5-10 years ago. The fact that it is happening now, means that we are moving forward.” For now, Beacon has begun by immediately filling an important gap, starting their operation in September 2005 with four schools. That particular year was rather unique because 11 other schools opened simultaneously, unheard of in Dubai where the yearly rate of new schools opening stood at 2-3 private schools for the past 10-12 years. This rapid expansion should have made Beacs con nervous. “Quite the contrary; new providers jumped in the market and existing schools opened new branches because of high demand,” Azzam said. Education providers cannot wait for the time when surplus demand in Dubai, the UAE and the GCC is replaced with oversupply. “The current market forces will dictate upon providers to improve their services and allow parents the ability to make an intelligent choice,” Azzam indicates.

The Beacon network, which has already grown to five schools, is a remarkable feat of balance and planning. Beacon’s Dubai British School is in a development owned by Emaar (Emirates Hills). The school is designed to cater to the British Expatriate community, offering the national curriculum of England in a co-education environment. At that time, only specific schools that had access to the higher authorities in the UAE could ask to offer co-education, a decision that required Cabinet authorization. “In a sense we were trail blazers because we opened communication with the ministry of Education saying that we want to be relevant to as large a population as possible, and that in certain locations coeducation is more appropriate than segregation and in others the opposite is true,” Azzam says. True to its word, Beacon appropriately opened an all-girls school “because in that particular location we thought that was the thing to do.”

AL-Mizhar American Academy for Girls, a K-12 school, was designed to meet the requirements of fairly affluent Emirati families who populated that area. “There is a lot of intelligence among educators that boys and girls learn differently, giving merit to the idea of segregation,” Azzam explains. According to Harvard University researcher Dr. Carol Gilligan, “…girls think, interact, display leadership and make decisions in a way that is unique both psychologically and developmentally.” The male-based model, she found, simply did not fit the way girls learned. Azzam further explains that when girls reach a certain age, “the whole boy thing comes into their minds. Girls who are quite talented in certain fields like sciences or math don’t want to appear nerdy when boys are present in the same classroom. In a way you relieve that pressure with segregation.”

Uptown in the Mirdif area is a K-8 Beacon school which uses the Primary Years Program (PYP) of the Interns national Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) and is in the application process for the Middle Years Program (MYP) in response to the cultural diversity of the area. “The campus is incredibly balanced in its ethnic composition, so you find UAE nationals, Arabs, Europeans and Asian subcontinent students,” Azzam says. PYP (for ages 3-11) focuses on the total growth of the developing child, in its social, physical, emotional and cultural aspects in addition to academic development. The MYP (for ages 11-16) is designed to help students develop the knowledge, understanding, attitudes and skills necessary to participate actively and responsibly in a changing world.

Beacon’s fourth school, located in Dubai’s ‘Green Community’, is an early childhood facility called The Children’s Garden. “It is the first school in Dubai which is not a nursery that sits in a refs furbished villa, because the building its self has to make educational sense to our kids,” Azzam says. Children at this facility learn English plus another language (in addition to Arabic). The Green Community, which is owned by Investment Park, is still in phase one of development and Beacon is already scouting a plot of land where it plans to build a high school that has the Children’s Garden as a feeder.

Beacon’s fifth and latest school, Raha International School, was founded in September 2006 in Abu Dhabi offering co-education for all three programs of the IBO, including the Diploma Program (DP) for ages 16-19. The DP prepares students for university and encourages them to ask challenging questions, grow a strong sense of their own identity and culture and develop an ability to communicate with and understand people from other countries and cultures whilst making of them “Citizens of the World.” “All of the leading edge programs in the world would be meaningless if students

do not connect with the teacher, hence only the most qualified teachers will be considered,” Azzam says.

According to Beacon’s School Development Manager Lesley Stagg, teachers need to have the right background to teach and each follows a professional development plan. “We look for teacher homogeneity where everyone should be clear about their duties and responsibilities but they always have our support and recognition even when they struggle,” Stagg says. Beacon has around 350 staff members and 1500 students. While it uses the latest in classroom technology, incorporating interactive whiteboards in all its schools, “this does not negate the role of the teacher, who remains a focal point in the classroom environment even when we move into an advanced e-learning stage.”

So how is the curriculum at Beacon different from other schools or school networks? “Having learned and taught at Sabis I can say that they have an extremely strong value proposition, with a very rigorous approach to education. I spent 11 years as a student and 6 years as a member of staff and I learned a lot as an individual. For that I am extremely grateful,” says Azzam. While every Sabis school is the same as the other and despite being a powerful approach, “it doesn’t always work for everybody.” “We have a holistic approach, by ensuring that physical play is used in learning, and learning is very much inquiry based.” Azzam explains that while Sabis might tell you “this is what you need to know, if you know it you will do very well in exams, just learn it”, for Beacon the inquiry based approach says “well, let’s put all books aside initially. Let’s talk about a subject. For example migration: Why do populations migrate?” The curriculum in this fashion uses the IBO approach where in a short period teachers collaboratively work on introducing less sons relevant to the students’ own questions and having students answer them. “We don’t want the child to feel that the world is segregated into 50 minutes of math, 50 minutes of geography, etc.” To achieve cross-subject learning using an interdisciplinary approach, the staff plan their lessons together to incorporate the social aspects of migration for example with the mathematical formula involved in calculating how many immigrants 15% of 15 million people are. “We make sure that that’s how students learn, with emphasis on skills rather than acquisition of knowledge.”

But isn’t Beacon falling into the trap of offering top-notch yet exclusive education only to those who can afford it,

contradicting its second objective to create real impact in the educational landscape? “In practice we have not yet been able to solve the problem of adds dressing the needs of all social classes without undermining the quality of education,” Azzam admitted “but in theory we know what we want to do.” Azzam said that Beacon schools address the needs of middle to high income families with a cost structure that starts at AED 22,000 ($6,000). “We cannot afford to charge any less and even at those rates it isn’t really viable, but we will not increase tuition in our second year of operation,” says Azzam. With tuition being the main revenue source and teachers’ salaries rep resenting a major part of the operating cost, what schools are usually tempted to do is to reduce salaries in order to reach a lower-income bracket of society. “Our recruitment of native speakers from the US or UK remains sacrosanct; the challenge is how to make Beacon schools relevant to people with weaker spending power,” Azzam says. Beacon has started to take the first necessary steps to address that by creating a teacher training institute that accesses local talent. These could either be expatriates living in the UAE who acquire the qualifications through the training school or local university graduates who will go through intensive professional development to bring them up to standards with the people that Beacon recruits from abroad. “While involving an intense screening process remains time-consuming, we make huge savings on accommodation and airline tickets, which represent a large part of our typical recruitment package,” Azzam explains.

Beacon’s plans in the next five years is to build, acquire or manage between 15-20 schools “In 2008/9 we will venture outside the UAE taking a serious look at Bahrain and Qatar where there are tremendous growth opportunities,” Azzam says. While Saudi Arabia always makes sense, the regulatory premise is not very favorable there at this point. Until the ministries there enact a favorable atmosphere for private-public partnerships, it looks like the private education providers will remain a coast clear of the opportunity which sits ready to be exploited for the benefit of millions of students.

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TAALEEM

The founders of Beacon Education had the idea, the vision, the drive and the knowledge, but not quite the finances. “One of the first things we had to do was raise funds to enable us to own the operations of this group because at the time, we didn’t put together enough money to build a hut let alone a school,” Beacon Education CEO, Ziad Azzam says. Between May 2003, (the year Beacon was incorporated) and November of that year, Beacon put together a Private Placement Memorandum (PPM) and took their presentation on the road and went knocking on the doors of the who’s who list of businessmen, and even members of the royal family in Dubai, Sharjah and Abu Dhabi. “Literally we had these four guys armed with a vision, a presentation and a document that says if you are happy with this then sign it. We were so successful that within months we raised the money that we needed to build our first four schools,” Azzam said.

Thus Taaleem, a Private Joint Stock company established in Dubai in 2004 became an investment vehicle for Beacon Education focusing on high quality educational projects to bring meaningful reform to the education sector. In essence, Taaleem owns the schools and brings in the funds. It has no operations and no CEO. It has an executive committee (four from Taaleem and two from Beacon Education) that approves certain investments. Beacon is an independent company that has a management contract with Taaleem. The network’s job is to do the legwork, including the business plan, program development and recruiting. Taaleem does the funding but has the right of refusal. The paid-up capital of Taaleem is AED 125 million ($34 million) slated to grow over the next six to eight years, when Taaleem launches a string of top-caliber schools across the region, raising in excess of AED 1 billion (approximately $275 million).

Taaleem, like Beacon, has two objectives. The first is to channel resources to bring in high-quality education to the UAE initially, and later to other GCC countries and Middle Eastern countries. Secondly, to allow investors the opportunity to put their money into education. “That ‘s a very exciting idea. From a financial point of view, it allows the initial investors to have an exit strategy and cash in on their investment, but mostly it allows anyone to own a piece of the company that educates their children,” Azzam said.

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Bea con EDUCATION founders

Ziad Azzam

CEO

Ziad Azzam is a Lebanese national born in Beirut and reared in the UAE. He graduated with an IB diploma from Choueifat High School (SABIS Network) in 1987 and joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he majored in Engineering and Physics. “I always knew I would be involved in Education,” Azzam says. In 2000 Azzam joined the consulting firm McKinsey & Company in Dubai where he stayed for three years before he became a Beacon Education partner and took the role of Chief Executive Officer of the company. “I am very excited about my role in Beacon not only because it involves Education which I’m passionate about, but also because I am less on the operational side and more on setting policy.”

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Helal Almarri

Chairman

Hilal Al Marri is a UAE national who studied in England where he earned an MBA degree from the renowned London Business School and later became a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. He worked at KPMG in London, in the areas of assurance and transaction services. He joined McKinsey as a Strategy Consultant and left the company to study for his MBA. Upon completing his studies, Al Marri had a choice to come back to McKinsey or take the job of Director General of the Dubai World Trade Center. He chose the latter. Today Al Marri is pulling double duty as both as Director General at DWTC and Chairman of Beacon.

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Waleed Almokarrab Almuhairi

Chief Operating Officer

Waleed Al Mokarrab Al Muhairi is a UAE national who holds a Masters degree from Harvard University and has a Bachelor’s of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University in the US. Here’s how Ziad Azzam, Beacon CEO describes him: Waleed is one of those globe trotter. He was actually born in Japan where his father served as UAE ambassador and his mother is Lebanese. His father later served as UAE ambassador to the US.” Al-Muhairi also taught at Harvard before joining McKinsey in 2000. He is currently the Chief Operating Officer of Mubadala Development Company, a wholly-owned investment vehicle of the Government of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. His primary responsibility is to oversee the business development activities of Mubadala including Acquisitions and Project Development in Energy, Industry, Infrastructure, Healthcare, Technology and Properties Development. Prior to Mubadala, Al-Muhairi worked with the UAE Offsets Group as a Senior Projects Manager. He serves on the Board of Directors of The Imperial College (London) Diabetes Centre, Oasis International Leasing Company, Leaseplan, Piaggio Aero and Mubadala’s Medical Holding Company. He also serves as a member of the Abu Dhabi Committee for Systems and Information, which is leading the E-government initiative in the Emirate.

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Dr. Mustapha Khemira

Investor and founding member

“Dr. Mustafa Khamira is a specialist in Islamic banking, and his contributions in the financial and business modeling phase of Beacon Education’s business plan were crucial and paramount to the success of the venture,” Beacon CEO Ziad Azzam says. Dr. Khamira held several positions at the Middle East Bank which later became the Emirate Islamic Bank. Dr. Khamira was also a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company.

By Hadi Khatib

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