Interview with Nord Anglia CEO Mr. Andrew Fitzmaurice

Yes, so I've been the Chief Executive at Nord Anglia Education for 12 and a half years now. I joined back in August 2003, and it was a very different organization then. In 2003, the organization had a number of different parts to it, including providing educational services to governments, providing nurseries in the UK — which are kindergartens for children under the age of four — and schools, international schools. And it's really over the course of the last 12 or 13 years that we have grown the number of schools that we have, from six up to — including the Meritas schools — there'll be 41 schools in Nord Anglia Education. So they're all over the world; they're in 15 different countries. And I like to spend my time visiting as many of those schools as I can and meeting the parents and the staff and the students in the schools, and really learning what's happening in each of our schools and seeing what we can do to help every student, every parent, and every one of the staff — you know, teachers and other staff in the schools — to benefit from being part of a larger organization. So our mission in Nord Anglia Education is that we want you, as part of the family of schools, to do better than you would have done if you were just in a school by yourselves.

So Nord Anglia Education was founded in 1972 by a teacher whose name was Kevin McNiven. His name is still Kevin McNiven. And Kevin founded the organization back then as an organization which teaches English as a foreign language. And so that was the start — started in Manchester — and the organization was located in Manchester, in the north of England, for many years. And then as the schools grew, we were actually located — at the time that we came out to Hong Kong, we were located in Burton on Trent, which is in the Midlands in England. And so we needed to really relocate to one of the more regional hub-type locations in the world, whether that was London or New York or Hong Kong or Dubai. And at the time, we had a lot of our schools were in Asia. We had schools in China. We didn't have any schools in the UK — we still don't have any schools in the UK — and we just felt, of all the choices, that Hong Kong was the best.

It does. So when Kevin McNiven founded the organization back in 1972, he wanted a name for the organization which meant a number of things. So he wanted something which was English — so Anglia is another word for England — education, clearly, because we were in education, and Nord, because we were actually located in Manchester, which was the north of England. So it's North of England Education.

So once we have joined together with the Meritas family of schools, there'll be 41 schools across the world. There'll be over 32,000 students, and we will have around about 6,000 people who work for Nord Anglia Education.

Yes, we were really excited and so pleased to announce the partnership with Juilliard, and it really goes back to what I was saying earlier about our mission — to make sure that if you are a member of the Nord Anglia Education family of schools, that you do better than you would if you were outside of that family. That's our job as Nord Anglia Education. And clearly, as part of that, to be able to enter into a partnership with Juilliard School, the world's leading performing arts conservatory, and to actually work with the staff at Juilliard to develop a specific curriculum in the performing arts which will benefit all of the schools in the Nord Anglia Education family and give our students access not just to that curriculum but also to Juilliard alumni, either through individual lessons or through summer schools. And the other thing that we're doing in association with all of that is that we've created something which we've launched this summer called the Global Orchestra, which means that students from each of our schools around the world are going to come to New York during this summer, perform in a Global Orchestra in New York, visit Juilliard, and get some lessons while they're there at Juilliard School, and just really benefit from the partnership. So there's lots of ways that we think our students in every one of the schools around the world are going to be able to benefit from Juilliard. And we are looking to do more partnerships with other organizations — not in performing arts, clearly we've got the partnership with Juilliard — but that benefit other parts of the curriculum.

That's a very interesting idea which we've discussed previously. We don't have anything where you spend a semester at another Nord Anglia Education school, but we do have a number of things which we call part of our Global Campus, where students from all of the different Nord Anglia schools around the world come together for different trips and different events and different experiences. So I talked about the Global Orchestra being one. Another thing that we do is every year we have around about 700 students go to our dedicated facility in Tanzania, along with other students from schools in all of the other Nord Anglia Education family of schools. So a number of students from each school go; they spend time in Tanzania, they work in some local schools, work with the local community. We sponsor orphanages and local day schools there in Tanzania in the local area. And then while they're there, they also get an opportunity to go to Zanzibar to learn directly about the spice trade and the slave trade which was based in Zanzibar, and also get the opportunity to go on safari and spend a couple of days doing that. So it's a dedicated facility purely for Nord Anglia Education students, and we think it's something that, again, we're able to offer because we're a family of schools and perhaps wouldn't be available if a school was just a standalone.

Well, I think that a CEO's role is something that you find you go into as you progress through your career. I don't think it's something so much that you set out at the beginning of your career and think, you know, I want to be a CEO, because it's such a broad range of different organizations and different fields that you can go into and be the CEO of. I don't know if there's anything specific I would say, but what I would say is that I know that many of the students in our schools are going to be the leaders of the future, and whether that is leading as a CEO of an organization or in many other fields that they will enter, many of our students are going to go into leadership positions. And I think that the thing for me which is really important when I think about leadership is to try and live the values that you're trying to instill in the organization yourself. And that's little things and big things, but really, I think a successful organization and to be a successful leader, it's more about the values — so that people see that you believe and that you follow what you're saying, rather than saying this is how the organization should be but then the behaviors in the organization or what the organization actually does aren't in keeping with what you've said the values of the organization are. So I would say as a leader of the future, which I really expect many of our students to achieve in the future, I would say the important thing to think about is, you know, what are your values, and to try and live by them.

I really never did think that I was going to be the CEO of a large organization. I think, like most people's careers, it tends to be a series of fortuitous events. You don't know what opportunities are going to come your way. I think a successful career, though, is built around making sure that when opportunity does present itself, that you make the most of it. And I'd certainly say that my advice to anyone would be that when you see a good opportunity, take it and make sure you make the most of it, because you never know when the next one will come along. But certainly for me, being given the opportunity back in 2003 to lead an organization like Nord Anglia Education was fantastic, and one that I was fortunate enough to take.

I think that the sort of qualities that I see our staff in all of the schools talk about are things which prepare you best for your life in whatever career path you decide to take, whether you move into the corporate world or any other of the things that are available to people for their careers. But I think it's about being hardworking, being honest, straightforward, being inclusive, thinking about the world. And I really do love what I see when I go to the schools and I see how focused our students are about thinking about what kind of a world they're going into and what kind of world they want to turn it into. I think that thinking about what kind of environment we're going to inherit and what kind of environment future generations are going to inherit — I think all of those things that I see going on at our schools are really important. And so what I see at the schools, I think, is preparing people really well for the future, and I've certainly been delighted to see it.

Yes, I think one of the philosophies in Nord Anglia Education which is really important is that we don't believe there is any limit on what any student can achieve. So we think it's very wrong to test someone at a certain age and say that you're going to achieve X amount or you're going to be a candidate for Ivy League or not a candidate for Ivy League based on some test that you sit at the age of 11 or 13 or whatever it is. So I remember being tested at the age of 12. I changed schools — I used to go to school in Canada and I'd been moved to a school in England, in the north of London, a place called Edgware, and then I subsequently got moved to another school in Kent. So in the course of about 18 months, I'd been doing three different curriculums and learning the same sort of subjects but in three different ways. One subject in particular that I struggled with was French. And because I'd done poorly at French in the first year of senior school, and a number of other students had done poorly at French, we were told that we couldn't do, along with all the other students, we couldn't do either Latin or German, which were the options available to them. We were told that we had to do remedial English. Now, that seemed particularly strange to me — I wouldn't have minded if they'd forced us to do remedial French, as that is what we hadn't been particularly good at, but anyway, it was decided that we were going to have to do remedial English. The problem with that was that a lot of the people that were put into remedial English almost had a stigma attached to them academically, in that it was thought that they would never achieve. And that was something that many of the students, including myself, actually, in the school, took some time to shake off. And really, it was only when we got into — well, for me, when I got into year 11 and 12 and started to get much better results — that I was finally able to shake off that stigma of not being particularly good academically, which stayed with me from the age of 12, because everyone who was put in that group was thought to be not good, and we actually used to call ourselves the remedial group. So I think that for me, one thing that I learned at school, and that I think is really important in life, is that you should never think about any limits to what you can achieve as an individual, and you should also never let anyone else place any limits on what they think you can achieve as an individual. And one of the fantastic things I see in all of the Nord Anglia Education schools is that we have this mindset that there are no limits to what our students can achieve, and I think that's really important.

I've visited Windermere Prep. I think it's a fantastic school in a wonderful setting. I think there are absolutely superb teaching staff there and support staff for the school. I've met many of the students while I was there — had the opportunity to meet many of the students and see their work. And I think that it's not just Windermere Prep becoming part of the Nord Anglia Education family, but the Nord Anglia Education family becoming part of Windermere Prep. And I think there's so many things that we can learn — so many fantastic things that are going on at Windermere that all of us in Nord Anglia Education can learn from. I think we're really looking forward to working together and to continuing the success of both of those organizations together and all of the people in them.