Sharjah American International School, Dubai Branch
Dubai, UAE · est. 2005 · PrivateSharjah American International School, Dubai Branch is an American school in Al Warqa 1, Dubai, which opened in 2005 already covering KG to grade 12, with sixty students and a small staff. The curriculum follows American standards, with the emphasis on actively building knowledge rather than listening passively; Arabic is taught separately and checked against the international IBT Arabic test from ACER. The school sums itself up as an American curriculum within traditional Islamic values. Students are measured often and with external instruments: CAT4 and MAP from grade 3 to grade 9 (MAP three times a year), NGRT for reading for children from five to sixteen, plus the PSAT, the SAT and the Arabic ABT. There is an emphasis on STEM, an inclusive education service and work on college and career readiness. The school belongs to a network of four campuses - Sharjah, Dubai, Umm Al Quwain and Abu Dhabi - owned by Aisha Sayyar and Nawaf Fawaz, and the network's shared education council keeps the curriculum consistent. Inside the school an advisory board of parents, senior students and staff meets monthly. The school is inspected every year by KHDA. The principals have followed one another like this: the campus founder Nadine Tarazi led the school from 2005 to 2014, then Dianne Leverett, and now Mohammad Sultan.
Key facts
Accreditations and programmes verified against official registries
Cognia · accreditationCollege Board · authorised programmeSAIS · school is part of the networkWhat stands behind each entry
The widest-reaching American accreditation: some forty thousand schools in over a hundred countries. It accredits both individual schools and whole school systems. It also sells a paid membership with no inspection behind it, and that membership is often passed off as accreditation.
What the badge means for this school. The school has been through this organisation's accreditation. It was judged as a whole: governance, safeguarding, staff, premises, teaching. The entry stands in the organisation's public register - anyone can check it.
Register to check for yourself, and the full guide →An American organisation that allows a school to put the letters AP on a pupil's transcript. The permission is granted course by course and tied to a particular teacher, it has to be renewed every year, and College Board reads the course syllabus before granting it.
What the badge means for this school. The school is allowed to run advanced AP courses - not the school as a whole, but one by one: by subject and by teacher. Governance, safeguarding and the primary years are not part of that check. Which subjects are actually approved is visible in the ledger. The entry stands in the organisation's public register - anyone can check it. Authorisation here runs a year at a time: the register lists the school for the 2025-2026 school year.
Register to check for yourself, and the full guide →Advanced Placement: American advanced courses for the senior years. The exam for a course is set and marked by the College Board, not by the school. A good result is counted by American universities as a first-year course already passed, which saves a student time and money.
What this means for this school. A school does not get to call a course AP automatically: the College Board reads the course syllabus and approves it separately for every subject and every teacher, and the permission has to be renewed each year. Every approved school in the world is listed in the open AP Course Ledger, and this school's entry there stands as a line in the accreditation block above. How many courses a school is approved for, and in which subjects, the ledger does not show in its general listing. AP has no leaving certificate of its own: it sits on top of the school's main programme rather than being a separate system.
The American school programme, with the High School Diploma at the end. It usually comes together with AP courses, which the College Board stands behind, and with an American accreditation - MSA, NEASC or Cognia.
What this means for this school. The diploma is written out by the school itself: the American programme has no common leaving exam, and the content of the senior years is set by the school. Outside checking therefore rests on two things here - the accreditation of the school, and the AP exams if the school runs them.
SAIS is a group of American-curriculum schools in the UAE which, on the pages of its own campuses, calls itself «the SAIS group of schools» and «The SAIS educational network». The group has no separate site: what follows is taken from the Dubai campus pages About and Contact, which also carry the addresses of the others - saissharjah.com, saisabudhabi.com, saisuaq.com. The geography is stated plainly: «The SAIS educational network spans four Emirates across the UAE: Sharjah, Dubai, Umm Al-Quwain, and Abu Dhabi». The count starts with the Sharjah campus: «The SAIS journey began with the establishment of our flagship Sharjah campus in 1997»; the Dubai campus «opened in 2005» and began «with 60 students and a dedicated core faculty». Two private individuals are named as founders and heads: the group is «founded and led by Dr. Aysha Sayyar and Dr. Nawaf Fawaz», who also «serve as the Governing Board for all SAIS institutions» - the surname is spelled two ways on one page, «Sayyar» and «AlSayyar». No group-wide student number is given, and ownership is not separated from management: the words «own», «operate» and «manage» do not appear.
What this means for this school. The network owns or operates the school. Its accreditation and programme authorisation the school obtains separately, in its own name.