For about 25 years*, we’ve learned children’s names before we taught them anything else.
We’re a small international Cambridge school in San Juan, Metro Manila. Long enough now that some of our teachers have taught a child, then that child’s younger sister, then waved them both off to university. This is the part of the school a website can only hint at — so here’s the honest version.
A teacher kneeling to a child's eye level mid-conversation — listening, not lecturing.
Consent required before publishing any real student or teacher.
“Where love and concern spell success.”
It’s an old line, and we’ve never wanted a newer one. In practice it isn’t sentimental at all — it’s a working rule. A child learns best from someone who plainly delights in them, so we hire for warmth as hard as we hire for a degree, and we keep classes small enough that no teacher has to guess who’s quietly struggling.
“Love and concern” is the teacher who notices a child went silent at recess and asks why. “Success” is what tends to follow once that child feels seen. We put the care first because, here, it’s what makes the rest possible.
We’re trying to help form a person, not just a transcript.
A Cambridge qualification matters, and ours travels — but it isn’t the whole point. We care just as much about the kind of person a child is becoming: honest when it costs them something, kind to the new kid, brave enough to put a hand up and be wrong.
So our quiet measure of a year isn’t only the exam results. It’s the Grade 4 who found his voice in the school play. It’s the teenager who gave up a lunch break to return a phone to a younger student she’d never met. Those are the reports we read most closely — and the reason a child here is never just a name on a list.
A wide, warm shot of the San Juan campus — children crossing a sunlit courtyard between classes.
Consent required before publishing any real student or teacher.
A quarter-century* in the same neighbourhood.
We opened our doors in 2001 and have stayed in San Juan, Metro Manilaever since. We’re not the biggest school in the city, and we’ve never wanted to be. What time has given us is something harder to build than a bigger campus: families who’ve trusted us with two and three children, and teachers who’ve been here long enough to know them all.
That continuity is the quiet thing we’re proudest of — the same first names on the same doors, year after year.
Figures shown are placeholders pending verification against current official records before launch.
I worried a smaller school would mean less. It meant the opposite. Every teacher knows my son’s name, his moods, the subject he’s scared of. You can’t fake that, and you can’t buy it.
In a city where teachers move on, ours stay.
Manila is a place where teachers often change schools every couple of years. Ours don’t. Many have been here a decade or more — long enough to teach a child, then that child’s younger sibling. When the adults in a building stay, children get something rare: a teacher who already knows their story before the first day of class.
We think that’s the most honest thing we can tell you about ourselves. So we asked them why they stay.
Four things we mean — shown, not boasted.
If our story has a shape, it’s these four: Cambridge rigor delivered by hand, character formed alongside intellect, a genuinely international community, and a school small enough to know every child by name. Each one comes with a real moment that proves it.
See the school your child would actually walk into.
A visit tells you more than any website can. Come meet the teachers, sit in on a class, and watch how a smaller school pays attention.