“The promise we make a family isn’t just a set of results. It’s a child who understands how they learn, with the confidence, critical thinking and resilience to achieve their potential. That’s Learning.First™. It’s the research, resources, partnership and the evidence base across 120 schools and 26 countries driving improved learning outcomes – and that’s why families choose ISP”
Emily Porter
Group Chief Learning Officer
International Schools Partnership
Screen Value, not screen time
Most EdTech never reaches our classrooms. What does, has been tested by teachers in our LabSchools and proven to deepen learning. We call it screen value, not screen time. Discover how it works in this video.
What should education deliver in the age of AI?
Exam results matter, but they are only the beginning. Emily Porter, our Group Chief Learning Officer, shares how we improve learning across 120 schools, the evidence behind our approach, and what we believe every school should give a child.
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AI is redrawing the workplace and traditional career paths. The world our students will enter is already very different from the one their parents knew. For us, the question is not whether education will change, but whether educators will lead that change.
We believe they must. Technology companies should not decide the future of schools on their own. Teachers understand how children learn, where they struggle and what helps them progress. That is why our approach begins with real classrooms, real teachers and real students and why every innovation must answer a simple question: does this make learning better?
“We know the classroom experience is changing and we need to navigate that shift responsibly. Are we going to leave technology companies to define the schools of the future for us, or are educators going to be at the forefront?”
Emily has spent nearly 30 years in education, from teaching and curriculum writing to leading the learning strategy across large school groups. Today, she is accountable for learning across 120+ schools in 26 countries. Her concern is that schools could become passive recipients of technology that has not been designed around children or tested for educational impact.
Our response is to create a safer, more purposeful learning experience and to evidence whether it works. We call this screen value. Technology earns its place in a lesson only when it adds measurable value to learning. This gives us a clear, defensible approach for parents who worry that their child will be left behind without AI, as well as those who worry that children are spending too much time on screens.
EdTech that is built for purpose, not bought
Our teachers told us where support is required for them and their students – we built our EdTech tools around their answers. Refined in our LabSchools and tested across 24 curricula, our technology is made in partnership with educators.
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We are approached by dozens of education technology companies and have assessed hundreds of products. Too few were created by teachers, for teachers and students, and too little evidence showed that they improved learning. So rather than starting with a product, we started with our people.
At ISP we have over 17,000 teachers globally. Our teachers identified 45 practical use cases: the recurring barriers that take time away from teaching or make it harder to respond to individual learners. Lesson planning was at the top of the list. Those needs became the specification for the tools we developed.
Three years on, our lesson design technology has already been rolled out across all 120 schools and continues to be refined through 11 ISP LabSchools and tested across 24 curricula and dozens of languages. It is not a white-labelled product and it is not for sale. It is part of the advantage we can create by working as one international learning community.
“A standalone school could not assess the market, build the tools and test them at this scale. That is what families gain when they choose a school within a group like ours: education experts designing learning on their child’s behalf, that one school could not do alone.”
Emily Porter, Group Chief Learning Officer
Two key principals we adopt to our Edtech and AI resonate with teachers and parents. First, our student-facing AI is Socratic: it does not simply hand over an answer. It asks the next question, it scaffolds your learning and supports students towards understanding.
Second, students are not sent to open public chatbots. Our tools sit within our own environment, helping us protect student data. They are also designed to recognise changes in a child’s disposition, indicating frustration, distress or disclosure and alerting the school’s safeguarding team.
“The narrative has to be that use of technology supports learning in the safest way.”
Emily Porter, Group Chief Learning Officer
The evidence problem
We only adopt what we can evidence. For us, it is screen value, not screen time. For seven years our schools have widened their lead over external exam benchmarks across different countries and curricula, and we continue to measure the impact of every tool we introduce.
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New technology can make a lesson exciting. But novelty is not the same as learning. Headsets, virtual reality and other tools can enhance an experience; the more important question is whether they help children understand more deeply, make stronger progress or become more independent learners.
“I want to encourage teachers and parents to demand more. A tool can be fun, but does it actually help children learn better?”
Emily Porter, Group Chief Learning Officer
We are tracking whether teachers using our AI planning tool design measurably higher-impact lessons and whether that effect appears in student progress over time. This sits within Learning.First™, our proprietary approach to improving learning through evidence, reflection and partnership between students and teachers.
“We are rigorous about evidencing student progression. We complete hundreds of learning visits each year, but the overriding finding is that the partnership between student and teacher drives impactful learning outcomes and helps ensure no student is left behind.”
Sarah Brown, Head of Learning.First™
The academic picture matters. Over the past seven years, our schools have widened their lead over external exam benchmarks each year. Eight of the ten major exam types taken by ISP students worldwide improved against benchmarks irrespective of school or country.
“Attainment on the day matters, but the widening progress gap is the honest measure of the additional value attending an ISP school delivers.”
Nick Campbell, Group Head of Academic Achievement
Life competencies that will set students apart
Knowledge is everywhere. What matters is what a child can do with it. Our research with Camtree at the University of Cambridge explores how life competencies can be taught, learned and, most importantly, evidenced in every classroom.
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As access to knowledge becomes more widely available through AI, the educational premium is shifting. What children know still matters, but their future will also depend on how they apply that knowledge, respond to change and work with other people.
“What used to be called soft skills have become essential life skills: flexibility, adaptability, multilingualism and resilience. Young people may have many different jobs and will need to learn, unlearn and relearn throughout their lives.”
Emily Porter, Group Chief Learning Officer
Good grades remain essential. Alongside them, resilience, adaptability, creativity, communication, critical thinking and digital literacy will help students navigate an evolving world. We do not expect children to acquire these skills by chance. We teach and practise them deliberately, within the curriculum and beyond it.
The difficult part is proving that this works. More than three years ago, we began research with Camtree, based at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge, to explore whether life competencies can be taught, learned and assessed. Eight reports have been published, and a second study is running across 11 schools in every ISP region. The work has informed a practical framework that helps our schools embed and assess life competencies in everyday learning.
“Our research shows that when life skills are taught through lessons, students benefit academically and personally. Using ISP’s AI lesson design tool, we are now weaving them into learning from the start of a child’s education and helping teachers assess how they develop.”
Camilla Woodhouse, Head of Life Competencies
The good struggle
A busy classroom is not always a learning classroom. We help students recognise when they are genuinely learning and give them the language to talk about it with their teachers, every lesson, every day.
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At the core of Learning.First™ is the “good struggle”: the productive effort involved in grappling with a new language, concept or mathematical challenge. It pushes students beyond what is comfortable, while giving them the support they need to persist and understand more deeply.
“In a time when we are outsourcing more to AI and algorithms, learning is still the very essence of our humanity. The optimum state is when students and teachers are both engaged and appropriately challenged.”
Sarah Brown, Head of Learning.First™
Visible activity does not always mean that learning is taking place. A child can put up their hand, complete a task or give correct answers while still treading water. The good struggle looks different for every learner and the student is often the person best placed to describe what is happening.
We encourage teachers to break the invisible fourth wall in the classroom: to ask students when they feel challenged, tired or stuck; to discuss how they learn best; to explain why a topic matters; and to reflect together at the end of a lesson. This turns learning into a partnership rather than something simply delivered to students.
“When students can monitor and optimise their own learning and recognise when somebody else is in a bad struggle, that is a superpower. It develops empathy, good leadership skills, and equips them to keep learning and adapting throughout life.”
Sarah Brown, Head of Learning.First™
Valuing every language
Around 95% of our students are multilingual learners. We treat every child’s home language as an asset to build on, supported by a language profile when the student joins our school and structured support throughout their education.
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Language proficiency is central to educational success. Research from The Bell Foundation, with which we work closely, shows that proficiency in the language of instruction explains substantially more variation in attainment than gender, ethnicity and eligibility for free school meals combined.
“Language proficiency is one of the strongest predictors we have of how well a student will achieve.”
Ruth Radwan, Head of Multilingualism
International education has historically placed a strong emphasis on English. But if English is developed at the expense of a child’s home language, education can open one door while quietly closing another. A graduate may be fluent and confident in English, yet lack the academic Spanish, Vietnamese or other home language needed to study or work in their own country.
We make a language profile for every learner on admission and provide tiered support according to their needs. In our international and bilingual schools, students can use a digital language platform developed with FlashAcademy®, alongside tools that help identify language needs across the curriculum. Technology supports teaching; it does not replace it. It helps students take ownership, stay organised and see their progress.
The benefits extend beyond language. Multilingual learners practise moving between perspectives and systems of meaning. This can strengthen flexibility, problem-solving, communication and adaptability – capabilities that matter in school, work and life.
Practising it for real
Confidence and resilience grow through experience. Our fifteen international programmes give students real audiences and real responsibility, from debating at Model United Nations in Geneva to reducing their own school’s emissions by acting on their sustainability ideas.
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Life competencies develop through repeated practice, not through a single lesson about resilience or communication. That is why our International Learning Opportunities are mapped to our life competencies framework and give students aged 4 to 18 meaningful ways to use what they are learning.
Students might represent a country at a Model United Nations conference in Geneva, have their journalism reviewed by the University of Chicago, or work with their school’s energy data and take responsibility for reducing emissions. These are not simulated outcomes. They involve real audiences, real decisions and the possibility that things will not go exactly to plan.
“You cannot teach resilience in a lesson on resilience. You build it by putting children in situations where they are challenged and have to work out what to do next.”
Camilla Woodhouse, Head of Life Competencies
The destination of choice
OECD research* shows that half of all young people still aspire to the same ten jobs, while gaining meaningful workplace experience can be harder than securing a university offer. We help students explore a broader range of pathways and by 2027, every ISP graduate will have access to a personalised, practical experience of the workplace.
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Our aim is for every student to leave school with the confidence and self-knowledge to chart their own path. We develop the skills they need to succeed and the professional guidance to support informed decision making, but they must have the agency to decide what success means for them.
“We encourage students to try as many things as possible, to discover pathways that may suit them and eliminate those that do not. The question should not be, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ but ‘What do you want to do more of?’”
Gwawr Tagg, Head of Future Pathways
We help students look beyond a narrow list of familiar careers, understand emerging opportunities and identify what attracts them to particular kinds of work. Practical experience begins while they are still at school. We also speak directly with employers about what they need from young people and where graduates are currently underprepared.
University will remain the right route for many students, but it should not be treated as the only marker of ambition or success. Employers including major technology companies have begun removing degree requirements from some roles. Students need the knowledge, experiences and confidence to consider university, apprenticeships, entrepreneurial routes and careers that may not yet have familiar names. We reached out to universities who we have partnerships with and our parent community to deliver the A to Z career preparation series for our students to help inform their choices.
“Employers consistently ask for people who are adaptable and resilient, who can learn quickly, work well with others and understand how they learn. Those are not only job skills. They are the qualities of a good partner, friend and citizen. A school that gets this right has given a child a better life, not just a better CV.”
Emily Porter, Group Chief Learning Officer
*OECD The State of Global Teenage Career Preparation, 2025.
