Year of Family 11
Funke Baffour-Awuah, Corporate Head of Wellbeing, GEMS Education
When the Ministry of Education announced the shift to distance learning on the evening of 4 May, schools did not wait for morning. Leaders, teachers and support staff worked through the night to realign timetables, test platforms and prepare communications so that when children opened their laptops the next day, everything was ready. At Jebel Ali School, Principal Simon Jodrell described it as exactly that: a real team effort, with the leadership team working late into the evening to ensure nothing fell through the cracks, particularly for examination year groups already navigating an uncertain semester.
For parents, it was another chapter in a semester that asked an enormous amount of them. And yet, the families in the UAE persevered through it all. Behind the Scenes, a Team Effort “There is no version of a sudden return to distance learning that does not carry disruption,” said Funke Baffour-Awuah, corporate head of wellbeing at GEMS Education. But what the disruption revealed was something worth noting: the depth of the relationships schools had already built with their communities.
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