Nick Davies, Head of College, Brighton College (Singapore)

Could you please start by giving us a brief overview of Brighton College (Singapore) as of today?

We are currently a school of 400 pupils in Singapore. We are a fee-paying, selective, international school. Our pupils range from 18 months to 13 years old. We have a pre-nursery group, which consists of our youngest pupils. After that, we get into mainstream education. We have a reception class, and it carries on all the way up until Year 8, which is where our 13-year-olds are.

It’s an interesting time in our development because, as of this August, we are going to expand from a prep school into an all-through school. What that means is that we will have our first Year 9 pupils in the school from August 2024, and then we’re going to grow a year group at a time such that five years hence, we have students from 18 months to 18 years old.

What would you consider to be the keys to the success of Brighton as of today?

The school has grown very, very quickly. We opened in 2020 with 35 pupils. To have grown today to a school of 400 pupils is clearly a sign of success. Brighton College is a school in the United Kingdom that is much older than us. We’re very proud of the association that we have with Brighton, and they have a lot of input actually into how we run our school.

The group considers itself as schools where academic excellence is cherished and sought at all opportunities, and that includes our youngest people as well as our much older people who are sitting in public examinations. However, it’s certainly not a hot house. It’s not interested purely in the academic success of our pupils. We value their holistic education just as much. So, we look for as many opportunities as we can to build confidence and develop their curiosity about the world around them.

Confidence and curiosity are two of our values, and the third one is kindness. We are a school that really values the power of kindness, and we do all that we can to encourage the pupils to be kind to one another and recognize how strong and important quality it is to be able to be kind to other people.

I would like to know more about the curriculum. You and many schools say that you are getting the kids ready for the future, but not everybody has a curriculum as strict as yours with math, English, science, geography, history and computing. Could you tell us a little bit more about the curriculum and how you have achieved such good results with your pupils?

We are a selective school. We need to acknowledge that this means we have people who are already really curious about the world around them, have lots of questions and are really keen to know more. However, even accounting for their good academic ability when they arrive with us, we’re very proud here at Brighton College (Singapore) of how much we help them exceed even what would normally be expected of those people, even given their already good ability. 

There are various statistical ways to look at that. Over the last two years, we have measured that over 57 percent of our pupils have exceeded what might be expected, even given their good ability in terms of their academic performance. We’re incredibly proud of that, and it’s certainly not something I’ve encountered in any other school.

The curriculum that we’re starting with our secondary school pupils from August 2024 is a blend of the modern and the traditional. We’re keen that we give our pupils a broad range of subjects that can really stimulate their curiosity. We’re really pleased with the staff we’ve recruited, who are secondary school specialists who will be starting here in August along with those Year 9 pupils.

I was involved in recruiting these teachers. What struck me was how keen these people were to work for a Brighton College school wherever they were based in the world. I was interviewing potential staff from everywhere, from the US to the Cayman Islands. I remember lots of European countries, Middle Eastern countries and countries here in Southeast Asia. All of them knew about Brighton College, and all of them were really keen to come and work for it because they saw Brighton somewhere that it is incredibly successful but also has some fantastic values that the school lives day in and day out. I’m talking about the Brighton College Group, but, of course, you know that’s absolutely the case here at Brighton College (Singapore) as well.

Your question was about academic success. It’s about having pupils who are already exhibiting a healthy interest and curiosity about the world around them. Then, it’s about putting superb teachers in front of them. It’s about ensuring that we’ve got a team of people around the child to help them throughout their journey because things come up throughout the teenage years. It’s not always an easy time of life for every person, and we recognize that. 

We put a team of experts around the child to help them so that if they’re struggling with a particular subject or something else going on in their life, we’re able to provide bespoke specific interventions to help them ensure that they really do not just achieve in line with their potential, but even exceed their potential. As I’ve mentioned already, those are some of the things that we do. However, we make sure that as well as really focusing on those academic outcomes, we will also have a lot of fun and a lot of enjoyment in and out of lessons along the way.

What do you mean when you say a mix between modern and traditional education methodologies? What would you mean by modern? What are the new implementations that you are bringing to the curriculum?

How are we showing innovation? This is something that is really important to the Brighton College Group. We’ve just finished a quality assurance visit, during which some of the Brighton College International team spent three days in school looking at our provision here in Singapore. I’m delighted to say that they were really pleased with what they saw in many, many ways, including in this one thing they really look carefully at, which is what they call the Brighton College DNA. 

It means a lot of things, but in particular, it means innovation in our teaching. So, how are we being innovative? Well, first of all, it’s in terms of the curriculum that we’ve built. In the process of building our secondary school, we have a subject in Years 7 and 8 called “The Story of Our Land,” which is a blend of the humanities effectively. I’m a geography teacher, but I’ve seen a lot of benefits in this idea. Rather than dealing with geography, history and perhaps religious education, which are often known as distinct subjects, let’s blend those together. What that does is it really helps give these pupils the skills, the knowledge and the enjoyment to help them become enthusiastic lifelong learners who are also equipped to become responsible and thoughtful citizens. That’s a Brighton-only subject that we are teaching here in Singapore as well.

We build time into our curriculum for something called Presentation Skills. Each child here is given the opportunity, training and support to become a really powerful and compelling public speaker because whatever it is they’re going to do later on in life, even given the rapidly changing world in which we’re preparing them, we know that almost all of them will have to speak in public whether that’s for presenting a business proposal to a board of directors or giving a speech at a wedding. We want to help our pupils with that, and that’s something that we can really work with them. That is a lesson a week in their timetable.

I mentioned some of our secondary school specialists who are coming in. I was talking to our head of science earlier this week, and he’s got some really exciting ideas about building a STEM curriculum. Rather than just working on the traditional sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics, he’s also going to work carefully with our design and technology teacher. We’ve created some really interesting and quirky designs and technology spaces here in Singapore, which we call our makerspaces. We’re going to blend our science provision and our design and technology provision to help stimulate that interest in science and engineering, which obviously is so important as we prepare our pupils to become engineers.

As our people become older throughout the school and years ahead, we will have things like a critical thinking course. I’ve taught critical thinking in the past. I really enjoy this because you can have a lot of fun with older pupils by encouraging them to challenge the views of the world that they’ve already established and getting them to look at different sources of information and to judge that before they follow the opinion that’s being presented to them or adhere to it. They learn to think about it. Where is that opinion coming from, and what are the agendas behind it? 

I’m a really passionate believer that we are exposed to so much information nowadays from a wide variety of different sources in terms of how strong or valid they are. With things like social media, you can absorb so much information. It’s very easy to be hoodwinked, I suppose, into believing points of view, which are quite honestly, quite often fairly biased, and so to encourage teaching our people to assess the source of material in that way, I think, is vital.

We’re big believers in digital learning, the power of artificial intelligence and teaching our people to use it. AI is something that we do. We built a digital learning and computing program where they will be tasked with using a wide variety of different AI platforms to help them with tasks because, again, that’s something that they will only have to do more and more of as that technology becomes more and more ubiquitous.

It’s not just at the top end. We’re also innovating down as young as our prep and nursery pupils. We’ve got a really exciting and fun woodworking opportunity. We’ve talked about the makerspaces in our senior school, but we’ve also got mini makerspaces down in our nursery. I’ve been over there this morning watching some woodwork, and people are really enjoying doing something constructive properly supervised. 

I was also just watching a cookery lesson. We have something called our health course, which includes a little bit of home economics. This morning, when I popped over there, we were teaching these little children aged five how to make apple crumble. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to taste any, as it wasn’t quite ready, but it looked really good. 

So, you know, we are something. We are a school that absolutely does value academic outcomes. We know we’ve got examinations to prepare them for. We want to give them the best chances we can do as well as they can in their examinations. That does mean the use of traditional skills and teaching methods in part. Just as much, we’re looking to try new, exciting and innovative teaching methods and resources so that our pupils are really inspired and motivated to achieve as well as they possibly can.

I’m guessing some parents are probably quite surprised often. I can only imagine having a kid who is a critical thinker and speaks the truth without all the ideological bias that we get as adults.

It’s a really good point. For me, that is absolutely what we want. Obviously, they have to be polite. They have to be courteous. We do have high expectations of all of our pupils. They challenge us in our lessons, and so, “Hang on, Sir. Hang on, Miss. What about this point of view? What about this thing that we’ve learned in another subject?” When that starts to happen, you know that you’re succeeding when they start in the right way with a courteous and respectful way to challenge us. I love that when that happens.

I had an interview today with the head of a school in the US. He was telling me how he thinks we have too much activism these days and too few leaders who actually can think for themselves. That’s the purpose of the school: to teach leadership, to know yourself first, and then that way, you can have an impact on the community.

I am interested in the fact that you touched on leadership there. Again, we actively promote and provide opportunities for leadership in the lessons and in what we call the co-curricular sphere as well. We already have a really active and diverse co-curricular program where we have lots of teams. Obviously, sport provides lots of opportunities for leadership, teamwork and resilience. That’s really important, but it’s not just with sport. We have leaders in our musicians, in our concerts, choirs and orchestras, and we have leadership opportunities in our dramatic productions.

We’re really keen that as our people mature, we look for other opportunities, such as the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme, which is something I’ve delivered and helped deliver in other schools in the UK. We’d like to have that in place here. Have you heard of the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme? 

I’m not that familiar with it, so I would appreciate it if you could elaborate.

I’m a huge fan of the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme. It was created by the late Queen’s husband, whose title was The Duke of Edinburgh. He created this scheme in the 1950s, and it’s carried on ever since. Thousands and thousands of children have gone through the process. 

There are three levels to it: bronze, silver, and gold. If you get a gold award, it’s a very prestigious award in the United Kingdom, and you typically would go to Buckingham Palace to be awarded by a member of the royal family. That gives you a sense of how prestigious it is. 

What does it involve? There are various components to it, but one of them is the need for the pupils to plan an expedition whereby they are fairly, independently and quite autonomous have to get from one location to another. They camp, cook and put up a tent and all that sort of stuff, and then pack up the next morning and carry on the next day to a place where they’re picked up from. 

As teachers, we help them, pop along and check that they know where they’re going and that they don’t get too lost. But most of the time, they’re walking on their own. It’s not just walking. They sometimes might be doing it on mountain bikes. I’ve seen it being done on horseback. I’ve seen it being done in a canoe. That’s the expedition part, and that’s what I’ve described. 

There is a two-day process for the bronze award. For silver, they go up to three days, and for gold, it is five days and has to be done in a mountainous country. They have to volunteer, so they have to go through a period of time acting as a volunteer, whether that’s doing things like helping in a nursery, helping in an old people’s home, a retirees home and things like that to help them contribute to society.

They have to learn a skill as well. They have to document what they’re doing, get evidence and create a portfolio to demonstrate what they’ve done. It’s quite an all-encompassing process. I know that there are schools here in Southeast Asia that are already doing that, and that’s definitely something I’d like to see in place in time for Brighton College (Singapore), among other such leadership and teamwork opportunities.

I wanted to ask you a little bit about the facilities. What would you like to highlight about Brighton College in Singapore?

We’re very lucky. Spaces are an absolute premium in Singapore for anyone. Anyone who’s been here will be able to speak to that. However, we are very lucky. We are on a very big campus, and we share it with the Australian International School. The Australian International has been here quite a long time. We obviously only opened four years ago, but we’ve got access to two swimming pools and several tennis courts. We’ve got two very large, fully air-conditioned sports halls. We’ve got cricket nets. I’m looking outside my window at an Astroturf. There’s an all-weather multipurpose pitch that we use in addition to that. We’ve got an awful lot of resources and facilities that we’re very lucky to allow and have for our people to use.

Is there anything I haven’t asked you about that you would like to mention?

I think I saw something in your notes about how we contribute to the community and our relationships with the wider community. Obviously, we’re still a relatively new school, and we’ve got big plans for increasing that interaction. 

We have had lots of our musicians go and perform at various events, such as the Christmas tree lighting up events at the British Club. We’ve had singing in senior citizens’ homes around the island as well. We’ve had Make a Difference Day. That’s another Brighton College expectation. We had an event whereby our pupils, our staff and lots of our parents, too, did a big litter pick out on one of the beach areas here and made a social event out of it as well.

While we have all these fun and exciting things running for our pupils, we’ve also got the Brighton Society, which helps parents form networks and get to know one another in various things. We’ve done Quiz Nights. We’ve had a Casino Night. We’ve got a jamboree-type fair coming up at the end of this term for our Brighton Society. 

One of the things that is really interesting is that all of the Brighton College schools work around the remembrance of old Brightonians who fell during the wars. Obviously, there are lots of war graves here in Singapore. Remembrance is a bit like Veterans Day in the US. That’s something that happens in the United Kingdom on the 11th of November. We had a number of our pupils attend a service around the time of remembrance here in Singapore to recognize and commemorate those who fell during the Second World War during the invasion of Singapore. 

Similar events are happening all around the world now because Brighton College is an international organization. I think it’s a really important way of linking the past with the present and teaching our pupils about service and respect. If done right, it’s a way of actually bringing people together and fostering even more unity. Those are some of the ways that we interact with our community.

You are new to the role. What is your final message and vision for the next three to five years?

Victor, that’s actually a very easy one. My vision is to build a superb all-through school, catering to pupils from 18 months old to 18 years old, so that they feel supported, cared for, and known to have a huge amount of success, both with their academic subjects and in preparing them for a successful and happy life once they leave us.