Daniel Todd on running an international school in Kampala

Daniel Todd runs the International School of Uganda, an IB World school in Lubowa whose families arrive from across the region and from the diplomatic and corporate communities of Kampala. The brief is an unusual one. He must deliver an education portable enough to follow a child to any country in the world, without letting the school float free of the one it actually sits in.

The demands of an international curriculum

Todd is candid that an international curriculum is expensive and exacting to run. Authorisation as an IB World school is costly and never permanent; it must be earned and re-earned. The workload it places on teachers is real, the planning, the moderation, the documentation. And the parent base, drawn from globally mobile professional families, arrives with high expectations and the experience to know whether they are being met.

His answer to all of this is deliberately unglamorous. The temptation, in the international sector, is to compete on prestige, on facilities and branding and the language of world-class everything. Todd argues the opposite: that the way to be a good international school is to be relentlessly good at the ordinary things, well-planned lessons, honest reporting to parents, and pastoral care that notices the quiet child as readily as the loud one.

Against the bubble

The danger he is most wary of is the bubble. An international school in a developing country can quietly become an enclave, a piece of somewhere else dropped onto Ugandan soil, whose pupils pass through years of their childhood without ever really knowing the city beyond the gate. Todd regards that as a failure, not a feature. ISU’s pupils, he says, should know Kampala, and the school works at the partnerships and the service programmes that keep the link alive.

A child can leave here with a passport to any university on earth and still have learned nothing about the country they grew up in. That would be a kind of failure, however good the results looked.

What he holds the school to

The standards Todd talks about are not the ones a glossy prospectus leads with, which is rather his point:

• Lesson quality: well-planned, well-taught lessons are treated as the foundation, not assumed because the fees are high.
• Honest reporting: parents are told the truth about their child’s progress, even when it is not what they hoped to hear.
• Inclusive pastoral care: the quiet child is noticed, not only the one who demands attention.
• Rootedness: partnerships and service keep pupils connected to the Kampala beyond the school gate.

The IB question for families

For families weighing the IB in Uganda, Todd’s pitch is plain and refreshingly free of salesmanship. The Diploma is the most portable qualification on offer in the country, the credential that travels most smoothly to universities across the world, which is precisely why it suits the mobile families ISU serves. But portability alone guarantees nothing.

The qualification, he insists, only pays off if the school behind it is doing the unglamorous work well. A famous curriculum delivered by an indifferent school is worth less than a modest one delivered with care. The question a parent should ask, then, is not whether a school offers the IB, but whether it offers the ordinary excellence, the good lessons, the honest reports, the noticed child, that lets the IB do what it promises.