Dear Parents,
So much has happened since we welcomed students in those first warm September days. We wanted to take a moment to celebrate all that has happened thus far during the first semester – and wish you a very Happy Winter holiday.
H-FARM International School Venice has now reached 666 students from 41 Countries and 95 staff members from 23 countries. We are also proud of new institutional partners which support the highest standard of education. We are now full members of the Boarding School Association (BSA). We have also completed our membership application to the Council of International Schools (CIS). Furthermore, we’ve strengthened our relationship with IB by gaining authorisation to offer the fourth IB programme, the IB Career-Related Programme (IBCP). We have done all this while expanding the reach of our own H-FARM Approach throughout the school by embedding for example H-Skills learning from the PYP right up until the DP. H-Skills provides us with a framework for deep reflections on identity, conflict resolution, mindfulness and many other schools which are central to our educational mission to develop balanced and capable human beings.
We are grateful to our students, teachers and parents for supporting the range of learning experiences we offer our students – over a dozen educational trips in the past three months, six major sports tournaments and many inspirational guest speakers. We have held science fairs, AI bootcamps, H-Ackathons, attended technology fairs and conferences, and hosted several Ignition lab meetings as we take steps towards being a leader in the eco-schools movement. We are also grateful to the dozens of coaches and teachers who manage the clubs during and after school so that students can choose to develop their passions with the 40 hours of learning every week we offer beyond scheduled school time to more than 300 students.
We are also proud of our academic progress. The real measure of this is the quality of thinking that goes on in classes around the school, but we are also satisfied that students in the PYP are performing better each year on the Cambridge English tests and that the International School Assessments (ISA) confirm that our students have learned more than their peers in like international schools over the past year. Our students in MYP 5 are performing above international school averages for English and Maths and are therefore well prepared, as a cohort, to enjoy the rigorous challenges of the Diploma Programme or the Career-Related Programme. Our teachers love learning too and have spent hundreds of hours developing themselves professionally in activities ranging from official IB trainings to mastering new technologies to operationalising the practices of deep listening which underpin restorative justice and healthy discussion.
During the Christmas season, many of our recent graduates will return home from the holidays and we are delighted when we learn that, whether they are studying in countries such as United States, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, or Italy they feel they have been well-prepared for future studies and for life beyond H-FARM.
All the above would not be possible without your trust and support, education is at its best when students are surrounded by teachers, families and community members that sustain their progress and success and we are really thankful for your role into that
Wishing you and your families a very happy holiday season,
Conan de Wilde and Antonello Barbaro, with Jane Andrews, Emiliano Cori, Paul Iacco, Sara Casagrande, Iliana Gutierrez and Alba Manso on behalf of all 140 staff members dedicated to our community.