At a meet-the-board meeting I attended last year, the Aarhus Academy
board in waiting likened their actions with regard to the existing
International School of Aarhus (ISAa) to a 'hostile takeover'. ISAa
was founded in 2003, as part of Interskolen, a Danish private
school. At present it teaches the IGCSE curriculum for middle school
kids and the International Primary Curriculum, but there have
also been periods when it has worked towards IB Certification. It has
90 English language pupils. In November 2010 an apparently
self-appointed 'independent board of the new ISAa' (also styled 'the
interim board', and with exactly the same seven members as the current
AAGE board, including a political candidate and a golf course
developer) issued a press release saying that ISAa was 'ready to leave
the nest' and that the independent board would be finding a new site
and taking over the school's management. This was news to the elected
Interskolen board with responsibility for ISAa who had agreed only to
cooperate in principle with the interim board. Following an AGM in
March 2011, the Interskolen board decided for a number of reasons -
including a lack of clarity on fees, location, staff, and funding -
not to hand over responsibility for their school without further
guarantees. The interim board simply set up a new school, AAGE, in
direct competition with ISAa. Until last week AAGE consisted of a
couple of teachers and a handful of kindergarten children. But it is
aggressively marketing itself as an alternative to ISAa at a time when
economic conditions mean it will be difficult for one international
school to survive in Aarhus let alone two. This fact was recognized by
ISAa's homeroom teachers who handed in their resignations en masse
last week as they were worried about job security at ISAa which they
felt was losing the marketing war. This leaves ISAa unable to provide
any schooling next year. It is a disaster for pupils midway through
their two year IGCSEs, since AAGE intends to go the IB route (and
indeed has an interestingly biased comparison of IGCSE versus IB on
its web site), although at present it is only an applicant for
certification; it has no PYP or MYP accreditation. ISAa's monthly fees
(with a cpr number) for next year would be DKK 2,900 while AAGE middle
school will be DKK 4,800. For some parents that's too much, leaving
pupils with no affordable English language tuition, and no IGCSE
tuition at all. AAGE has based its seemingly ambitious growth figures
on its sponsors' continued expansion and there being significant
demand for IB education in Aarhus. If these don't materialize,
international pupils in Aarhus may have no school at all.