Exploration Academy at TASIS England

The main course covers three areas at once — Business and Entrepreneurship, Science and Engineering, and Media Arts — and binds them to a single team project: students imagine, develop and manage an original theme park or entertainment destination. They decide what to build, how to spend a limited development budget, what experiences to offer and how to attract their audience, investigating the science and engineering behind the attractions as they go. Alongside the main course each student chooses one elective from creative art, digital journalism, graphic design, music, performing arts, robotics and video production. Students bring their own laptop for their courses.

A residential programme for students aged 11 to 13 on the TASIS England campus. The fee covers tuition on the main course and the elective, boarding accommodation on campus, meals in the School dining service, the daily sports and activities programme and the excursion programme. Students travelling on their own and arriving on the opening day of a session can be met at London Heathrow or London Gatwick by a School representative at no additional expense. Horse riding is offered at an additional cost.

Students board on the School campus in separate boys’ and girls’ accommodation and are placed by age group. Rooms hold between one and three students, and the large majority are double rooms shared by two. Room allocation is decided by the School to keep the boarding environment safe and inclusive; friends and siblings are not placed together, so that every student meets new people. Accommodation is not available before the opening day of a session or after five in the afternoon on the published closing day.

Meals are served by the School dining service and are part of the programme. The menu changes through the week and always includes vegetarian dishes and a salad bar; dishes containing meat, wheat and lactose are labelled. The campus is nut free. Allergies, intolerances and special diets are listed by the family on the medical form before arrival, and the School then advises on the arrangements it can make.

The day is built around lessons in the morning and early afternoon, then sport, activities and free time. The campus offers basketball, football, tennis, volleyball, fitness training and yoga, with arts and crafts and food and nutrition alongside them, led by the School’s own coaches; horse riding is available at an additional cost. Evenings bring study time and an evening activity, and weekends are given to excursions — London landmarks, West End theatre, Chelsea Football Club, the Warner Bros. Studio Tour, and destinations such as Oxford and Brighton. Students who stay for both sessions also take a compulsory overnight trip to a destination in the United Kingdom between them.

The programme uses the School’s 46-acre campus in Thorpe, Surrey, west of London: classrooms, boarding houses, a dining hall, outdoor playing fields, a fitness centre and the rest of the sports provision the summer programme draws on. The on-campus Health and Well-being Center has nursing staff on duty around the clock, and a hospital is nearby.

The academy is aimed at the age when a child is still finding out what interests them, so it deliberately refuses to narrow the choice: business, science and media arts arrive together, inside one project a team of students owns from first sketch to final presentation. Students come from more than fifty countries and the working language of the whole campus is English. The day is structured from breakfast to lights out, with staff on the boarding houses and a published schedule parents can read before their child arrives.