![]() ![]() Varkey says he has been sounded out for joint ventures in 71 countries. He cites grim global statistics: 69 million children don't have a school to go to, 250 million schoolgoers cannot read or write and 400 million to 500 million kids are in schools reporting consistently low test scores. Varkey argues for a role for private and nonprofit operators. In contrast with other businesses, emerging economies have the most mature private schooling markets. Private schools such as GEMS' could be an answer, yet the word "profit" carries a stigma in education, says Varkey. "But the education crisis is making it obvious that governments alone can't meet rising demand." "We're in a sector that is still controlled and monopolized by the government," says Varkey. Yet many public schools struggle for funds and look to outsource tasks such as student assessments. The global market for school operations was $2.38 trillion in 2012, according to Chicago consultancy GSV Advisors. "At GEMS my daughters get the experience as that of a disciplined, academically intensive school back home in India." "They are all top-ranked schools," said Rajesh Ravi, a marketing executive at a Dubai outdoor media firm whose three daughters study at GEMS Our Own. Among IB schools, GEMS schools around the world had an average pass rate of 91.5%, while the benchmark was 78%. GEMS' Indian schools in the Arab Gulf had a 99.9% pass rate using a popular college-oriented curriculum (a fifth scoring an average of 90% or more), exceeding similar private schools in India. Straddling the whole spectrum from basic to premium, the schools have earned a reputation for high-quality academic outcomes. Employing 13,400 in staff, mostly teachers, it covers the gamut from $250-a-year schools in India to $40,000-a-year tuition in the U.S. In countries such as the Philippines and South Africa GEMS advises governments on managing their public school systems. Its network comprises 132 schools with 142,000 students in 15 countries spread across the Mideast and extending into the U.S., China, the U.K. Indian-born Sunny Varkey, 56, who never went beyond high school himself, has built $500 million (revenues) GEMS Education into the largest operator of private kindergarten-to-grade-12 schools in the world. "The quality of education here makes every penny well spent," says Roberts, whose two sons studied at a public school in Houston before her husband, an oil company executive, got a foreign posting. Parents like Karen Roberts, an American recently relocated from Texas, are happy to pay its annual fees of $30,000. There's an Olympic-size swimming pool, film editing suites, even a planetarium. Preferred by more affluent Western expats, its campus is in keeping with Dubai's glittering skyscrapers. In the Al Barsha neighborhood nearby is the plush GEMS World Academy, which offers the International Baccalaureate (IB) program to 1,850 students from 81 nationalities. Its waiting list runs into the several thousands. ![]() Said to be the world's largest single-location girls' school and offering an Indian curriculum, GEMS Our Own is so popular with aspirational South Asian immigrant workers that it ran out of alphabet sets for its beginner-level kindergarten sections (it has 37). on a typically bright Dubai morning a stream of 160 yellow buses pull into a schoolyard in suburban Al Warqaa, and as many as 10,000 girls in cream-and-brown uniforms, students of GEMS Our Own English High School, come spilling out. ![]()
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