From the Head of School

What Stories Numbers Tell

Bureaucracies like statistics because they seem to tell a hard, objective truth.  A number is either true or it's not.  Schools are, among other more important things, bureaucracies - and in that capacity gather all kinds of numbers.  But numbers aren’t really the truths in themselves that they pretend to be; they come with stories attached.

ISA’s demographics are a perfect example - 10 years ago, our students were mostly expatriates.  From about 2019 to June 2025, we were about 50% expatriates; this school year, that number fell to 41%.

But what about the non-expats, what do we call them?  Unprompted, most people use the word ‘local’.  But that is not how bureaucracies work - we don’t ask a child, ‘are you local or expat?’  In fact, we note down the passport that contains their residency rights.  If a child has several passports we take the one with the visa in (or the UK citizenship) and put that on our system.

So right now, September 2025, 59% of our students have UK passports - a statistic I get from our student management system.  So what’s the story when each Thursday this month, I have had lunch with different groups of Grade 5s.  Have I been meeting lots of ‘locals’..

Listening Lunches with Grade 5s

Well, there are statistics within statistics.  We may have 59% of UK citizens overall, but Grade 5 is at 45% (Grade 10 has 78%).  But statistics can also obscure truths.  I have talked to over half the grade so far.  I have asked each one to describe their nationality.  Only one has said ‘Scottish’ - and he had lived in the US for a while.  A number have lived here their whole life but are still just half Scottish (because mum or dad is from another country) or in two cases not Scottish at all (because mum and dad come from another country).  A fair few of the expats were half this and half that (according to their own descriptions) or had lived in multiple countries - at least half were bilingual as a result.

For these Grade 5s, the question ‘where are you from’ is not the simple one our bureaucratic systems demand, where to be counted is to be strictly defined for just one box; it is the beginning of a story about who they are and what is important to them.

If something as seemingly simple as national identity cannot be captured by statistics, imagine what it is like to get a full understanding of each child.  Yes, numbers are useful but if you remember that they are just the starting points for inquiry.  Throughout their school careers children encounter all kinds of numbers that might seek to sum them up - exam grades, often the most powerful. But whatever the stat we should never forget that is not how we can know them, we know them through the relationships we have.