BEAM Closes Al Barsha Campus in Dubai
A week after announcing the temporary closure, for one year, of the American School of Creative Science (ASCS) Al Layyah campus in Sharjah, and the transfer of its students to the larger American School of Creative Science at Maliha, the BEAM Education Group has now announced the permanent closure of the third ASCS campus, in Al Barsha, Dubai.
Students from this campus can transfer to the International School of Creative Science at Nad Al Sheba, which currently offers the UK curriculum, but will offer a US curriculum stream to students from September 2020.
The ASCS Al Layyah campus opened in 2016, initially from KG to Grade 4 attracting over 600 students. The much larger ASCS Maliha branch, which was also significantly expanded over the past two years, has sufficient capacity to integrate the students from Al Layyah, whilst enabling BEAM to mothball the Al Layyah school for one academic year.
ASCS Al Barsha also opened in 2016 together with the UK curriculum International School of Creative Science (ISCS) in Nad Al Sheba, marking the start of BEAM's foray into the Emirate of Dubai. By the time of the first KHDA inspection of the ASCS campus in February 2019, when the school achieved an Acceptable rating, it had expanded to Grade 7 and attracted some 450 students, of whom close to half were Emirati nationals.
The ISCS campus at Nad Al Sheba, meanwhile, which was inspected at the same time in 2019, and achieved a Good rating, accommodated double the number of students, some 911, from FS1 to Year 8. Of these students, 412 were Emirati. The school also had a surprisingly high number of Students of Determination, numbering 105 in total.
By adding the US curriculum to the Nad al Sheba campus, BEAM has provided the ability for students to transfer from the Al Barsha located school. Whether they do so remains to be seen. For the locally-based Emirati population there are two GEMS National Schools on the door step, GEMS National School for Boys and GEMS National School for Girls, although both are UK curriculum, with fees significantly higher than those of the BEAM schools.
