High School: NAE Global Campus Update

A summary of the upcoming NAE Global Campus events - fantastic opportunities for our students in Bangkok and around the world - and a discussion of Bangkok’s recent air quality.

It was great to see so many High School students and parents on Saturday. Thank you to everyone who came: to all the High School students who ran stalls or performed on the Library Stage or the Quad Stage, to all the teachers who supervised the (very big) queues for the different attractions and, of course,  to the PTG, for a Great St Andrews Community Fun Day.

On Tuesday and Wednesday last week I joined webinars with Nord Anglia Education and teachers from Nord Anglia Education schools around the world to talk about a number of upcoming Global Campus events, taking place both in Bangkok and around the world.

Last week we heard that both Pear and Angel have been shortlisted for this year’s Global Campus Creative Writing Competition. Their work will appear, with 86 other students from around the world, in this year’s Creative Writing & Visual Arts Anthology and is now available on the Global Campus for this year’s Visual Arts Competition, with students all 54 Nord Anglia Education schools choosing which piece(s) to illustrate, with paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, photographs, etc.

Next week we have another visit from Kathryn Andersen, our link with Juilliard. Kathryn has visited St Andrews several times in the last few years, and on this visit she will be observing Music lessons in both the Primary and High School, watching St Andrews Presents… and teaching some High School Music lessons on Friday morning.

Later this term we will be visited by Benjamin Moermond. Benjamin is originally from Cincinnati, USA and studied at The Juilliard School of New York. He has been principal bassoon with the Hong Kong Philharmonic since joining in 2010, performing such pieces as Haydn's Sinfonia Concertante, Telemann's Double Concerto for Bassoon and Recorder, and Mozart's Bassoon Concerto. We are looking forward to another great Juilliard visit.

Also later this term is this year’s Tanzania Expedition, with 34 students and four teachers travelling to Tanzania for a week of Service work with the local communities and villages around Maji ya Chai, in the Arusha region of Tanzania, or with the local Masai communities in Ngare Sero village. The students have been working hard since August, including at Saturday’s Fun Day, to fundraise $300 US each towards these service projects.

After half-term we will be launching our first MIT STEAM Challenges, beginning with a Hacking Challenge for Years 7, 8, 9 and 10. The MIT STEAM theme is Navigating Tomorrow, and work on this theme will continue during the second half of this term and next term, building up to this year’s Project Week in May.

We will also be launching this year’s Global Challenge, focusing this year on Global Goals 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) and 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) soon after half-term.

One of the objectives for the Global Campus is to allow schools, and students, to have better opportunities than they could have in a school that was not part of Nord Anglia Education. Our links with over 50 other schools around the world, and with Juilliard, MIT and the UN show that this is very much the case.

Mention of Sustainable Cities links nicely to a discussion of Bangkok’s air quality, which has been bad at times in the last few weeks due to the cool mornings - the photo on the left shows the sky when I arrived at school this morning. Luckily most of the High School was away on Residentials, in the fresh air of the countryside, two weeks ago, when Ms Diane wrote about this issue in the EY/KS1 Newsletter.

As we do with temperature and humidity (the Heat Index), we keep an eye on a number of sources and adjust students’ activities accordingly. Measuring air quality is, however, much more complicated than measuring temperature. Our two closest monitoring stations are at King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital on Rama 4 and The Thai Meteorological Department at Bang Na. Both of these stations are about 7km from the High School, but they often show very different figures and it would not be correct to simply average them.

This is further complicated by the changes in air quality during the day - the photo on the right was taken at lunchtime today - and the different ways in which different countries calculate air quality with, for example, Chinese websites (e.g. http://aqicn.org) changing figures hourly as opposed to the US which uses a 24 hour average (see here for more on this).

Map from Thailand’s Pollution Control Department

One final complication is that the Thai Government's Pollution Control Department, who provide the data for any other website/app that you may use, did not, until recently, report PM2.5 figures. These are still not shown on either their webpage or their app, but, they are now updated regularly on their Facebook page.

As Mr Geoff wrote last week, we are currently exploring looking the possibility of purchasing our own air quality measuring equipment, which would allow us to have much more specific data at both the Primary School and the High School, and to see how our air quality compares to that at the King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital and The Thai Meteorological Department.

I look forward to seeing many of you at St Andrews Presents…  on Wednesday evening (there are still a few tickets available), and then at the Year 11 and 13 Parent/Student/Teacher Meetings next week.

Roo Stenning
Head of High School

The full High School Calendar is available on the school’s website.