About Us

Our Journey

DESS Oud Metha celebrated its 60th birthday in 2023 and is the oldest British school in Dubai.  DESS College opened in 2005 and provides Secondary and Sixth Form education from ages 11-18.

The new-build DESS Academic City, which opened in September 2025, sits alongside our existing DESS Oud Metha and DESS College.

All our schools provide opportunities for students to flourish in a DESS environment built on kindness, gratitude and humanity, that ensures they are not only aspirational but also nurtured in their creative, social and emotional capacities.

Together, DESS Oud Metha, DESS Academic City, and DESS College educate 3,800 students according to the English National Curriculum, and we are proud and delighted that our Oud Metha primary school and College are consistently rated as Outstanding by the Dubai schools’ regulator, the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) and the British Schools Overseas (BSO) inspectorate. We're certain the new primary school will follow suit in due course.

Having not-for-profit status means our schools and College are not required to deliver profits to owners, shareholders or investors. Like other not-for-profit entities, once our running costs have been met, every surplus dirham can be invested directly into our schools.

And this isn’t new. In fact, it’s been the case ever since DESS’s first 10 students arrived at a small block of flats in 1963 to be taught by a British airman on loan from Sharjah RAF base.

Those humble beginnings quickly paved the way for the appointment of our first Headteacher, Harry Atkinson, the following year, the move to our cherished Oud Metha site in 1967 and the formation of our Board of Trustees in 1969.

Countless other defining moments of growth and achievement followed as we marched through the decades to 2003 and our bold decision to build DESS College so that our Year 6 children had a guaranteed secondary school destination at a time when there were so few options.

Then came the addition of our Sixth Form campus in 2017, along with the acquisition of the grounds and facilities that went with it.

And here we are again. Our new primary school in Academic City opened in September 2025. Relevant, radiant and raring to make more important decisions to make sure we create better people for life and protect and preserve DESS for the next 60 years.

Looking ahead, we have asked ourselves a simple but important question: what does it really mean to create great people for life? Our new three-read strategic plan sets out our answer. Built on six pillars - wellbeing, inclusion, community, learning & teaching, curriculum and professional growth, it captures both where we have come from and where we are going.