Excellence Together
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Excellence Together Hastings School, Madrid, Spain Cognita was founded in 2004 with a single school in the United Kingdom and a clear INDIVIDUAL vision for what defines teaching excellence. Since then, our Group has grown to over INTERNATIONAL 60 schools in seven countries and thanks to the efforts of our talented educators and COLLABORATIVE support staff, we have helped thousands of students achieve more than they believed possible. Providing excellent teaching and IMPROVEMENT supporting every student to achieve his or her full potential are the cornerstones of ACHIEVEMENT a Cognita education. We are proud of the diversity of our schools and we continue EXCELLENCE to celebrate and preserve the qualities that make each one special. Likewise, we are proud of our students, who work BILINGUAL hard to achieve the results that enable them to enter some of the world’s leading MODERN universities. As William Yeats once said, education is not the filling of a pail, but HERITAGE the lighting of a fire, so we will continue to inspire our educators to light the fire of TOGETHER learning in our students. Rees Withers WE ARE Chief Executive COGNITA Stamford American International School, Singapore School, International American Stamford INDIVIDUAL 01 INDIVIDUAL More than 60 schools in seven countries, yet no two are the same. More than 30,000 children in our care, yet every one of them is unique. Supporting the uniqueness of our schools, and the individuality of There is a common focus in our schools: to our students, is central to Cognita’s purpose. It is just as important provide a high-quality education firmly rooted today as it was when we began our journey with our very first school in the principles of building excellence and in 2004. We have more than 4,500 teaching and support staff seeking continuous improvement. working in our schools and offices, each bringing a different and We support and challenge children to valuable perspective. achieve more than they believe they can. That means our teachers are highly attuned Each school that chooses to join our Group has something unique to to the needs and capabilities of each offer, something parents value and cherish. That is why every Cognita individual child and able to personalise school, whether in Brazil, Chile, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, Vietnam or learning accordingly so that every student the UK, retains its own unique ethos, with curricula and programmes achieves his or her full potential. tailored to the needs of the parents and children it serves. St. Andrews International School, Sukhumvit 107, Bangkok, Thailand Bangkok, 107, Sukhumvit School, International Andrews St. INTERNATIONAL 02 INTERNATIONAL Today, Cognita is a truly international operator, with a growing family of schools in Asia, Europe and Latin America. From our early foundations in the UK, we have extended not only our students in our schools in Singapore, Thailand geographical reach, but also the range of curricula and education and Vietnam to develop their teamwork and programmes that our schools offer. leadership skills through regular sporting competitions both within the Asia region and International reach means an international outlook, and there is a strong further afield. Such opportunities broaden the focus within our schools on languages and on teaching that encourages experience and outlook of our students and students to embrace a global mindset. Cognita’s educators deliver a range teachers whilst offering an exciting way to build of internationally renowned curricula such as the International Baccalaureate linguistic, social and cultural skills. (IB) as well as the national curricula of leading education markets such as England and Wales, Australia and the United States of America. Indeed, a number of our schools offer multiple curricula as well as bilingual and trilingual programmes. We harness the diversity of our Group to enhance the learning opportunities for our students and teachers alike. ExPro, Cognita’s Exchange Programme, creates tailored international academic and cultural exchanges between our schools. The Cognita Asia Sports Association (CASA) encourages King’s School, Plymouth, United Kingdom United Plymouth, School, King’s COLLABORATIVE 03 COLLABORATIVE Together, we are stronger — more aligned and more effective. We capitalise on the diversity of practice and expertise within our global family. By encouraging constant dialogue between peers and between schools, we share best practice, which in turn raises standards and leads to the strongest possible outcomes for students. For Cognita, the relationship between each of our schools and its parent community is of paramount importance, as we believe in parents as co-partners in the education of their children and that strong collaborations of this kind are a major factor in high student attainment. For this reason, we ensure that each of our schools makes a firm commitment to listen to and act upon parent feedback in order to support continuous improvement, and we back this commitment through our Group-wide parent feedback programme ‘Help Us Grow’. Our approach to collaboration extends beyond the boundaries of our Group, and this is reflected in the strong tradition of philanthropy and volunteering within our schools. Together, Cognita schools raised over £175,000 for charitable projects between 2012 and 2014, a common theme being support for education and children in less fortunate circumstances. To provide more impact from these endeavours, Cognita became a corporate partner of the worldwide non-profit organisation The Global Fund for Children, which supports grassroots projects that help children to thrive, even in the most challenging circumstances. Such engagement with the wider world is a key way in which we develop our students’ understanding of themselves as global citizens. Downsend School, Surrey, United Kingdom United Surrey, School, Downsend IMPROVEMENT 04 IMPROVEMENT We don’t believe in standing still. We develop and improve the schools that join our Group. Cognita takes a systematic approach to raising standards because we understand Because we are a group, we are able how important academic rigour and student achievement are to the parents who to create professional development choose our schools. To ensure that our students achieve the strongest possible opportunities for teachers and their outcomes, we use external testing systems and a common framework to assess leaders that simply are not available in student potential and progress and to predict future grades. This allows our teachers standalone schools, such as internal to tailor the teaching for each student and create an individualised learning plan that conferences and specialist training to provides the correct challenge and support for each child. We monitor the impact fund postgraduate qualifications and our teachers have in helping students to achieve beyond expectation by setting them school management programmes for targets for their own teaching performance and professional development. our future school leaders. We also seek to enhance the quality of provision in our schools through targeting capital investments to meet specific school improvement and development objectives, be that investing in classroom infrastructure, sports facilities or technology such as one-to-one iPad programmes. We also invest in our teachers and school leaders through training and professional development programmes to enhance their pedagogical capabilities. ACHIEVEMENT We are proud of the achievements of Cognita schools and the students in our care. ACHIEVEMENT The high level of attainment in public examinations, from A Level to International Baccalaureate, Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank to Chile’s Prueba de Selección Universitaria (university selection test), reflects the commitment of our 05students and their teachers. Key curricula examinations such as these are, for many parents, the ultimate measure of academic quality, and our schools’ results are well above the relevant national or regional benchmarks. It’s no surprise then, that the students graduating from Cognita schools have high university acceptance rates. Destinations of recent Cognita graduates include the following top 100-ranked institutions*: Brown University University College London (UCL) Columbia University University of Bristol Cornell University University of British Columbia Duke University University of California, Berkeley Durham University University of California, Irvine Erasmus University Rotterdam University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) University of Cambridge Hong Kong University of Science and Technology University of Edinburgh Imperial College London University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign King’s College London University of Manchester Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) University of Melbourne London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) University of Michigan Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) University of Oxford McGill University University of Pittsburgh Michigan State University University of Queensland, Australia Monash University University of Southern California New York University (NYU) University of Sydney Pennsylvania State University University of Toronto Stanford University University of York Tufts University Yale University *Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2013-2014 IB Curriculum Average Diploma Point Scores 40 35 30 25 20 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 Cognita