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Major private school operators in Dubai have reported a boost in enrolment as children return to school for the new academic year.
As pupils arrived to start classes on Monday after the summer break, education providers such as Innoventures Education, which operates Raffles and Dubai International Academy (DIA) schools, said they had seen enrolment rise by 16% this year.
CEO Poonam Bojani said, “Student enrolment across Innoventures Education schools has gone up by 16%, as compared to the same time last year, with an increase of 20% to 40% across certain class groups.”
Bojani said Innoventures had also seen increasing demand from parents requiring early education for pre-school-age children; as a result, the group launched an early childhood centre at its DIA campus in Al Barsha for children of up to three years.
In an interview with Dubai Eye, Alan Williamson, the CEO of Taaleem, which operates schools across the emirate, including Dubai British schools and Uptown International School, and had its IPO on the Dubai Financial Market (DFM) last year, said that the company had seen enrolment growth of 8% across portfolios.
The company said there had been 12,700 students in its ‘premium portfolio’, or higher-priced schools, at the end of the 2022–2023 year, rising to 13,700 at the start of 2023–2024, a figure that Williamson said was ‘growing by the minute’ as pupils continue to join.
The growth in enrolment may indicate the start of the population growth targeted by the Government of Dubai, which aims for the emirate to be home to 7.8 million by 2040.
Data cited by Williamson and confirmed by Taaleem showed that 25% of the company’s newest cohort of pupils were children starting school for the first time at kindergarten or foundation-stage education, while 40% were new students coming to the country for the first time.
GEMS Education, which operates 44 schools across the UAE and Qatar, also told Gulf News that its enrolment rates were some of the highest it had seen. The group CEO said the growth was ‘across its entire ecosystem’.
“In our higher income schools, we are seeing a much stronger rate of enrolment growth,” he said.
“I would say our growth rate for the year ahead is going to be circa 7%, but I would argue that in your higher-price-point schools, you are potentially talking about double-digit growth.”
The company reported last week that it had hired 2,445 teachers from 590,000 applicants, which Varkey told Dubai Eye “signalled an incredible year of growth for Dubai and the UAE more broadly”.
(Reporting by Imogen Lillywhite; editing by Seban Scaria)
