Our Own English High School Sharjah - Boys - Sharjah - Juwaiza

Our Own English High School Sharjah - Boys Branch is led by Principal & CEO Mr. Srivalsan Murugan, whose guiding motto — Semper Ad Meliora, Always Towards Better Things — sets the tone for a school that has demonstrably improved under his stewardship. Mr. Murugan oversaw the significant 2019 campus relocation and merger with GEMS New Our Own Private High School, consolidating the school onto a purpose-built site in Al Juwaizah and expanding its curricular offer. Governance sits with a Board of Governors chaired by Michael Guzder, and the school operates as part of the GEMS Education network — one of the world's largest private education groups — providing institutional backing, professional development pipelines, and quality assurance frameworks that independent schools typically cannot match.

The 2022 SPEA inspection rated the school's leadership and management Very Good, with inspectors specifically highlighting the "very effective and inspirational school leadership team" and praising "the drive and expertise of the board of governors and the professional partnerships with the school community" as key strengths. This represents a meaningful step forward from the school's previous Good rating in 2019, with the improvement attributed directly to focused strategic planning that engaged all stakeholders. The inspection team of seven reviewers conducted 210 lesson observations, 25 jointly with senior leaders — a level of scrutiny that lends weight to their positive conclusions.

On staffing, OOB employs 164 teachers supported by 4 teaching assistants, serving a student body of 3,287 boys. This produces a student-to-teacher ratio of 1:20 — notably higher than the Sharjah-wide average across Indian curriculum schools, and considerably above the broader city average of 1:13.6 across all private schools in the emirate. For parents, this is a meaningful data point: larger class sizes can limit individual attention, and it is an area worth exploring at open day. The inspection recorded a staff turnover rate of 10%, which signals reasonable retention for a school of this scale, though no direct city-average benchmark for turnover is available for precise comparison. [MISSING: staff qualification percentages — proportion holding postgraduate or Masters-level qualifications not disclosed in available sources].

Parent engagement is treated as a structural priority rather than an afterthought. Mr. Murugan's welcome message explicitly frames parents as "collaborators, staunchest supporters and most constructive reviewers," and the SPEA inspection process incorporated parent surveys as a formal input. The inspection's commendation of community partnerships reinforces that this is not merely rhetorical. Student attendance of 96% — a figure inspectors noted positively — is itself an indirect indicator of community confidence and school culture. Areas the inspection flagged for continued development include the systematic embedding of innovation across all lessons and the broadening of curricular pathways for senior students, including industry internships — both of which reflect ambition rather than dysfunction in an otherwise well-led school.