Where This Comes From
Big Barakah did not begin as a school
It began in 2017, when Expo Live opened funding for projects tackling the world’s biggest challenges and a team facing youth unemployment first-hand applied with a model for schooling that went past academics into social, emotional and industry-led learning. Expo Live awarded the research grant. Project You launched in 2018.
Eight years on, that model has run in schools, in public libraries and inside government programmes across the UAE, Australia and Malaysia: it is the model Big Barakah schools are built on, and the record on this page belongs to Project You rather than to Big Barakah.
The Record
7,500+
learners since inception
3
Expo Live grants (2018, 2019, 2020)
25+
industry partnerships
2022
impact presented at the UN General Assembly
Build & Guild
Schools
- 1,000 students across 10 schools and six national curricula by 2019
- 73% increase in student engagement in their local communities
- 43% increase in self-confidence and wellbeing
Leap Talent Incubator
Ages 18 to 35
- Around 200 graduates, 80% of them Emirati
- 85% programme completion, 90% satisfaction
- 40% reported improved livelihoods after the programme
- 27 industry partners and mentors engaged
School of Life
Community
- Launched June 2022 with the Dubai Government, converting public libraries into learning centres
- 1,000+ learners in the first three months
Built with Expo Live, the Dubai Government, the Al Ghurair Foundation, Area2071, the Dubai Future Foundation, Hub71, the Arab Youth Center, Dubai Culture and in5.
The Sources
The method is assembled, not improvised
Every part of how Big Barakah teaches comes from somewhere, and we will tell you where: the Islamic pedagogy, the life-skills curriculum, the project formats and the assessment instruments each have a named source behind them.
Islamic pedagogy
The Tarbiyah Project (Dawud Tauhidi) supplies the tawhīd-centred integration of faith across subjects rather than beside them. The Cambridge “How Islamic is My School?” toolkit (Ahmed and Habash) supplies the audit framework and the seven character aims we assess against.
Life and employability skills
UNESCO’s life skills programme (1996) was the case study for the first Build & Guild curriculum, developed in 2018 under the first Expo Live grant and piloted in one school before expanding to ten.
Innovation practice
Our project and lab formats are benchmarked against the IDEO Moonshot Accelerator, Day One Futures and the 2071 Moonshot Apprenticeship.
Assessment instruments
The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children at admission, Strengthfinder 2.0 at the start of Stage 4, and weighted averages across written work, portfolios and project deliveries from there on.
How It Runs
Five roles, not one teacher
A Big Barakah classroom is not run by one teacher: five roles carry a student through a project, and a student works with all five inside a normal term.
- Learning Coach
- The main educator for teaching, skills and competency development, and the person who reviews each student’s portfolio with them.
- Expedition Guide
- Owns everything outside the building. Partners, mentors, visits, excursions and showcase days, local and international.
- Competency Architect
- Designs the learning modules and the schedule, builds the assessments, and owns pathways before, during and after.
- Subject Matter Leads
- The specialist lead for each thematic area, responsible for the group projects under it.
- Experts in Residence
- Practitioners working out of the school’s own workspaces, mentoring students on live projects.
One Student, One Project
What that looks like for Sara, Stage 4
She meets her Learning Coach to review her competency portfolio. They decide to push her data storytelling. From the project list the Competency Architects built, she picks Mapping Urban Heat Islands, which sits across science and data visualisation, and joins a small team under a Subject Matter Lead with a science background.
To handle the data, her team books a GIS mapping workshop through the Expedition Guide. To build a physical model for the final presentation, they spend afternoons with the Master Artisan in the makerspace. The Expedition Guide connects them to a city planner who supplies real datasets and agrees to sit on the panel for their final presentation.
Through the pressure of the project she has regular check-ins with her Learning Coach and attends a workshop on managing team dynamics. At the end she uploads her final report, her data visualisations and a written reflection on her own teamwork to her digital portfolio, assessed against criteria the Competency Architect defined. Her team closes it at the community showcase.
The Curriculum Spine
Every term runs on a question
Every term runs on a question, and every question is answered through projects that students actually build. These are prompts from our Australian campuses. Every campus writes its own, against its own city.
Year 7 · Why is change needed?
- How might we recreate the model of the Prophet’s mosque in Madinah?
- How might we, as head coach, reimagine the culture of a losing team to create a winning mentality?
Year 7 · How do you build ideas?
- How do we increase profits from a Bunnings sausage sizzle?
- How might we redesign the Sydney Harbour Bridge?
Year 8 · How do you build working relationships?
- How do we improve triage systems in Liverpool Hospital?
- Stranded on an island: how do we build a new life?
Year 8 · How do you present with clarity?
- How might we make a documentary about being a teenager today?
- How might we design a museum that represents your family and heritage?
What Project You Has Run
Build & Guild is the schools programme, developed by a coalition of academics, neuroscientists, government officials, educators and young people. It splits in two: Build is a progressive curriculum in social and emotional skills, and Guild is a modified design-thinking programme in which students work for six months alongside a single industry expert.
School of Life runs creative, life and financial skills for whole families in converted public libraries, in partnership with the Dubai Government, on weekday evenings and all day at weekends.
Leapis the talent incubator for ages 18 to 35, built with government and corporate partners in 2020, and it runs in three phases (Pathway to Purpose, then Skills to Mastery, then Impact to Industry) with each lane defined by an industry-leading company. Learners graduate by shipping a project against that company’s own live challenge.
Frontiers and Encounters bring the same approach inside existing schools, post-16 and Year 8 to 9 respectively.