Principal's Welcome

It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to IAA. I am very proud to be leading a school that is young yet mature, dynamic yet stable and whose students are so articulate and confident yet grounded and compassionate.

IAA is a values driven school and we interpret education broadly. We view learning as a process and as an outcome. We encourage the development of our core values and skills as well as knowledge.

We value the whole child as an individual, with specific needs to be supported within the IAA community. As a result, I am very proud of our sporting success and the Hawks teams. In addition, our major theatrical productions are now of a standard that amazes me! Students who want to be involved in trips, MUN, Robotics, F1 and other activities, can find their niche at IAA.

The strength of both the IB Middle Years Programme and Diploma Programme offered in the Secondary School translates into IAA graduates who are better placed to fulfill their potential and make a meaningful contribution to a fast- changing and complex world. This is due to IAA’s academic rigour, breadth and depth, along with the associated "soft skills" built into our educational system.

In the Secondary School we recognise that we have a range of diverse learning profiles amongst our students from grades 6 to 12. We are committed to doing our best to meet their needs. Our teachers place an emphasis on differentiating instruction for learner variability and we also have a dedicated Learning Support team working to individualise support for students as necessary.

Like most schools, IAA will be judged by its examination results...and rightly so. We are very proud of how our cohorts have done and their placement in prestigious universities around the world. Our Diploma results get stronger every year and show continued stability and success in our ability to nurture and bring out the best in our students.

However, we strongly believe that we must not just settle for the measurable over the valuable, or the quantitative over the qualitative, for to do so would be to minimize and simplify the challenges facing the global citizen. If we know anything about the future, it is that it will be dominated by change, uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity. Those who can manage these challenges and succeed will be those students who have developed those characteristics defined in the IB Learner Profile. I sincerely believe that amongst our future leaders will be students from IAA.

The supportive relationship between students and all those who teach, guide and care for them is evident as one walks around the school. Such relationships are key to enabling any young person to flourish, and I would therefore invite you to visit our community before deciding whether IAA is the right school for your child.

We trust that you will find it easy to navigate through our dynamic website and that you find all the information that you require. Happy browsing!

Martin Thompson
Secondary School Principal

A COVID note! As with many schools around the world, the end of the last academic year and the start of the current academic year have been dominated by a switch to online learning. I am extremely proud of how our teachers and students have adapted to this ‘new normal’. It is not what we want, and has highlighted to us all just how important it is to be physically together as a community. However, we have made the very best of the situation we face and I am pleased to say that all subjects continue to be taught the full curriculum, with many innovative ideas being introduced to keep learning social, interactive and practical even from home. We hope this situation will not last for long, for the sake of the whole world, but whilst it does, IAA students continue to learn and be challenged.