The Power of an International Education

As educators, we are responsible for preparing young people for the future. We give them the skills they need to thrive, and in an international setting such as Oxford International College (OIC) Brighton, we place huge value on the ability to learn from, work alongside and communicate with those from backgrounds different from your own. Ours is a very English setting at the foot of the South Downs national park, and we enjoy sharing British culture and values with our diverse student body, but we celebrate the strength of a community which includes, today, some 31 nationalities.

School should prioritise cultural exchange. Language learning is beneficial to the developing brain. Celebrating diversity and creating a sense of belonging is essential for young people to thrive. If we can achieve this during the formative school years, we are setting our students up for future success.

They aim to win places at G5 universities, where their ability to work with and understand people from diverse backgrounds will be a key advantage: staff and students at Imperial College London represent 150 nationalities. At UCL, 50% of students and 34% of staff are international. After graduating, our students plan to enter competitive professions. Companies such as Standard Chartered are proud of their “talented and committed workforce representing 131 nationalities across more than 54 markets.” (UK student opportunities | Standard Chartered) And at Unilever, they acknowledge that “diverse teams operating within an inclusive environment have proven to be higher performing, more agile and faster in responding to changing consumer needs.” (A beacon of diversity and inclusion | Unilever). For our future medics, they are entering an NHS where 1 in 5 workers are foreign born, in a workforce representing over 200 nationalities.

At OIC Brighton, you don’t have to look far to see the advantages of such internationalism. In a university preparation session with Year 12 and 13 students, we were discussing the “cancel culture” evident on UK and US university campuses. We looked at historical examples of censorship and the relationship between social media and free speech. In the room, we had a boy from Thailand who was able to reference the 2021 unrest and the role social media had played; a girl from Belarus who discussed the treatment of journalists in her home country and a boy from Kazakhstan whose cousin had experienced first hand the stringent social media checks being undertaken by US immigration officials. It was an important discussion made fascinating by the diversity of experiences and perspectives among the class.

Education is not necessarily embracing and preparing students for their global community. A report published this summer by the Higher Education Policy Institute highlights the decline of language learning in the UK education system. Under 3% of A Levels taken in 2024 were in modern foreign languages, and undergraduate enrolments in language have fallen by 20% over

the last five years. As part of our induction of new students in August this year, an ice-breaker encouraged students to find out how many languages they each knew. The highest in the group was eight. When I worked with a student preparing her application for a Linguistics degree, she was able to share anecdotes about the way humour mistranslated in their friendship group of Cantonese, Spanish and Russian speakers. We embrace this culture of language learning: students study non-native Mandarin and Russian and, whilst this initially attracted parental enquiries as to the perceived “value” of these languages, we now have Nigerian students undertaking Mandarin at GCSE and a student from Myanmar successful completed GCSE Russian. The language exchange has been fascinating, with friends learning one another’s languages as a hobby, and a Malaysian-born science teacher undertaking Masters research in translanguaging techniques to better understand how we support our diverse language learners across the curriculum.

Our school is part of a global family of schools in the Nord Anglia Education network and this gives our students access to a Global Campus with opportunities to compete against, debate with, join conferences with and undertake expeditions alongside students from dozens of countries around the world. A visiting group of students from Nord Anglia schools in China visited OIC Brighton on their first ever visit to the UK and heard from our students about what it’s like to study in the UK, and from our teachers about how to apply to UK universities. Regardless of the current political climate, this is the “soft power” of which the UK has always been proud – and which our students can now exercise, on a global platform.

I am particularly proud of an OIC Brighton student from Moscow whose story, I think, exemplifies the power of an international education. She won a scholarship for her international Olympiad competition entry on Katherine Johnson and, having never studied in English before, achieved straight 8s and 9s in her GCSE after just one year of study with us. In the nationwide Articulation competition, run by the National Gallery, she spoke movingly about the so-called “degenerate” artist Oskar Kokoschka and successfully won through to the national final which was held at the British Library earlier this year. A Russian student of science, presenting in English at an Art History event at a national institution in London, about a Hungarian painter: this is what successful international education looks like; and how much richer our world will be as a result.

Tess St Clair-Ford, 

Principal

October 2025