COBIS Supporting Associate of the Year Award

We are very proud that CENTURY have been awarded COBIS’s Supporting Associate of the Year Award for their work with British School Salalah (BSS) and British School Muscat (BSM) in implementing our innovative iGCSE curriculum FlexEd.

Please see below to read their entry for the award.

British School Salalah (BSS) has always had a thriving primary school, but wanted to find a way to support students to continue their studies through GCSEs without having to leave Salalah.

Together with British School of Muscat (BSM), the school created FlexEd – an innovative iGCSE curriculum that combines in-school face to face learning, online teaching and independent study, supported by CENTURY Tech, an AI-powered personalised learning platform.

The program works like this:

• Five days a week in school in Salalah.
• Face-to-Face teaching for English, Maths and Arabic GCSE as well as specialist subjects in Art & Design, PSHE, Music and PE, delivered by two dedicated full time teachers and two specialist teachers.
• Remote learning via timetabled online tutoring from BSM’s world-class team of UK-qualified teachers in Muscat, for iGCSE Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Computing and French, supported by a member of staff in the classroom at BSS.
• Century’s online personalised learning platform supports students in Science and Maths.

Oman’s Ministry of Education granted approval for FlexEd in May 2020, and the schools are now able to provide a Key Stage 4 education to students in Salalah where previously none existed.

What impact did this project have on the school community?

While Salalah is a rapidly developing modern city, it has not historically had the infrastructure to support proper key stage 3 and 4 education.

FlexEd has enabled BSS to extend the reach of quality, affordable British education to more young people in Oman – all through a unique combination of teacher ingenuity, collaboration and technology.

The model has proven to be highly adaptable through the pandemic, particularly during school closures, with students and teachers smoothly transitioning between learning in school or 100% online. Even when online, students are supervised in-person by a member of staff, so the benefits of both online learning and face-to-face support from a teacher can be realised.

As a result, students have continued to make good progress whether in school or online.

The best of both worlds – face to face and online learning

In a parental survey after FlexEd’s first term, 100% of parents agreed that their child was making good progress, they could see this progress and would recommend the programme to others. 100% of students agreed that “compared to traditional ways of learning, I think FlexEd gives me the best of both worlds – face to face AND online learning”.

The program has also widened the skill set for the schools’ teachers in both Muscat and Salalah.

With FlexEd, BSS and BSM have developed an innovative education model, underpinned by CENTURY’s state-of-the-art technology, that is not only helping students navigate the ongoing disruption of the pandemic, but has also expanded access to Key Stage 4 education to more students across Oman and beyond. This forward-thinking approach can also serve as a helpful model for schools in other countries where the cost of providing traditional high quality international schooling is prohibitive or where it is difficult to recruit teachers.

Read more about Century’s work with BSM.