Being A Head Teacher

How one school and its leaders and teachers responded to a global crisis.

- Rebecca Bisset

My father was a head teacher of a tiny little school in the middle of nowhere in Africa, but I can’t imagine what it would be like being in charge of a large international school in Singapore. I recently spoke with NICK MAGNUS, the head teacher of Dulwich College (Singapore), which is widely regarded as one of the top international schools on the island. Dulwich is one of the newer international schools here in Singapore, however its “mothership”, Dulwich College in London, is one of the oldest schools in the world.

I asked Nick a few questions about how he and his team managed through the pandemic, from the challenges they faced to the things they learnt.

Dulwich has schools in different parts of the world; did this help in preparing for the onset of the COVID-19 crisis?

Thanks to our connections with our sister schools in China, we received word around Chinese New Year that things were likely to get a lot worse. We started planning right away and were fortunate to benefit from the experiences of our international network of schools who were ahead of the curve and had already switched to e-learning. This gave us a significant head start; so when the Circuit Breaker kicked in eight weeks later, we were well prepared with our own e-learning programme.

Once the penny had dropped that this was going to be fairly serious, what were your first steps?