Many of us hold the erroneous notion that education must either be affordable or excellent. Despite this widespread belief, very expensive schools can underperform, just as schools with reasonable rates can maintain the highest standards and receive the highest scores on international tests, all while remaining affordable for parents.
Our families, even those with multiple children, find One World International School (OWIS) to be more than worth it. Not only do we impart to our students a first-class multicultural education, we focus on systems and excellence of teaching. We also put emphasis on a unique fee structure and centralised administration, resulting in a well-run school that gives parents the flexibility to choose where to put their money.
Keeping costs low with excellent systems
At OWIS, we work hard to implement the best systems, saving us time and money. At some private schools, payment handling, HR management and administrative services can easily become disorganised and bureaucratic, taking on a life of their own. We avoid that by maintaining firm structures surrounding discipline, payments, employment and more. The streamlined efficiency that results keeps OWIS competitive and affordable for parents from a wide range of backgrounds.
Core and optional activity fees give parents flexibility
We know that parents have different beliefs about what constitutes an important subject or activity for their children. That’s why we have separate fees for core curriculum from non-compulsory activities. That way, everyone is paying for core classes such as physical education, for example, but you only pay for additional soccer if you want to.
In other schools, fees are all bundled together so that you’re paying for activities whether or not you will actually be putting your children into them. This can be doubly expensive if you’re taking your children somewhere else for an activity not offered at the school, but still have to be paying for unused activities that occur during the same time slot. We avoid that with compartmentalised fees that allow you to design the education you want for your child or children.
Giving teachers a reason to stay over the long haul
One of the biggest money pits at private schools (and schools in general) is teacher turnover. Not only is it a serious time suck to find, hire and inculcate new teachers, but each lost employee represents the lost value of their training and tenure at the school. While this might seem like an impossible situation to avoid – and we can’t always – we fight hard against it here at OWIS.
There’s another way: by being one of the very best schools to work for in the area, we can find and hire excellent teachers who want to stay with us over the long haul. While it’s impractical to believe there will never be turnover, we have successfully reduced it at our school.
Leveraging the global schools foundation scale
Running a private school brings many challenges. Private schools tend to be small, without the large support networks of public schools. The myriad tasks that go into running an educational facility – procuring materials, hiring good teachers, maintaining buildings and grounds, handling payments, communicating with parents, and so on – can quickly become overwhelming for standalone schools. As a result, they feel they must bring on additional staff and implement additional systems, both of which increase expenses for the school.
Here at OWIS, we neatly avoid that by leveraging the scale offered by the Global Schools Foundation (GSF), to which we belong. While we are a self-managed private school, we are able to make use of the administrative systems offered by GSF, which means we can utilise shared services that lower costs.
At OWIS – unlike at some other schools – you can trust that “private” does not equate to “unreasonably expensive”.
