Schools that offer lessons beyond classroom walls

Year Two pupils from Hillcrest Preparatory School Msimbi Masidza (left), Tala McClay and Gil Harel learn how to make ‘chapatis’ during the school’s annual Cultural Day. COURTESY OF HILLCREST

By DOREEN WAINAINAH


IN SUMMARY
From music, theatre to sports, students here have a chance to make a career for themselves away from books.

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Schools that offer lessons beyond classroom walls


At the Rose Theatre in London, the audience sits enthralled, watching a play that follows a young Rwandese refugee, Esperance, and her siblings fighting to survive in a camp in northern Tanzania. The cast of the play includes students from Braeburn Schools in Kenya.

So good was the reception of the key play that the Braeburn cast will be returning to London this year in conjunction with an English school to re-run the play at the International Youth Arts Festival.

Extra-curricular activities have steadily found their way into the education system with parents who seek international education for their children also seeking the additional activities to give their young ones an edge.

All-rounder

Christopher Wheeler’s daughter has taken up martial arts in school. The six-year-old also plays the piano and is keen on pottery, all of which she is offered at school.

In addition to her course work, this is moulding her to be an all-rounded student with the option of later taking up any of these hobbies as a career.

According to Mr Wheeler, CEO of Hillcrest International Schools, the principle of providing education for students has been “how much water can you put in a student’s jug”, but now it has morphed to “how big can you make the student’s jug, they can put in the water themselves.”

Originally the preserve of a handful of high- cost schools, extra-curricular activities have now been absorbed into the different schools, with any institution worth the name ‘international’ boasting of a long list of activities and subjects that set them apart from ordinary academic-oriented schools.

“Traditionally, the big subjects have been law, medicine, engineering and business. These have been very strong over the years and still are,” says Alex Manning, Sixth Form and university admissions advisor at Braeburn Schools.

The shift from the traditional is, however, evident with students venturing into wider fields. “Now we have creative arts, psychology, drama, sports and recreational science becoming popular as careers,” says Mr Manning.

The term extra-curricular in these institutions is not used to describe a handful of sports offered occasionally for the students to participate in, but a long list of subjects and activities tailored to meet the student’s individual needs and future career options.

Parents are now opening up to the idea of holistic education. “We have parents who have come in with children who are academically well-off for us to ‘bring them out of their shell’,” says Leon Bareham, the headteacher of Hillcrest Secondary School.

For St Andrew’s School in Turi, Molo, the parents extend their support for the different activities done by the school by hosting teams while they are in Nairobi.

Tapestry, pottery, art, kayaking and canoeing, flying, cycling, instruments, music and archery are just but some of the activities that students in these schools take part, in addition to the usual academic courses.

At the Rosslyn Academy’s Got Talent show at the institution in Nairobi, the students showcased their prowess in different fields from comedy, to music and even dance.