Our Global Community Day event traditionally held on campus in May celebrates our culturally diverse community. In this large, fair-style event, students, parents, and teachers are all involved in a myriad of activities such as food stalls featuring food from home, arts and crafts booths, water games, performances, art auctions, charity projects, and second-hand book sales. It is a big day out for everyone and a wonderful opportunity to get to know each other better in a less formal setting while having fun and building stronger bonds within our community.

Though we are not able to hold our Global Community Day this year, we would still like to highlight our strong international community with our dedicated teachers and principals as its backbone.

Excellent teaching body

Being an international school, we have a range of teachers from overseas as well as from our host country of China. Our staff body hails from over fifteen countries. Our teachers are carefully selected through a rigorous, multi-tiered interview process that ensures that every teacher in our school shares the core values of our school’s philosophy, is the right fit for our school, and feels welcome and comfortable with the choice of teaching at YCIS Beijing.

This is highlighted in the fact that not only do most of our teachers hold master's degrees or PhDs, but also our overseas teachers have a tenure of an average of five years, often extending their initial teaching period with our school. More than sixteen expatriate teachers have been working at YCIS Beijing for five to ten years and another three teachers for more than a decade. Our long-term relationships with our teachers can be attributed to the safe and committed learning and teaching environment that our school, rooted in Beijing for 27 years, and our YCYW education network, cultivated in China and around the globe for 90 years, provides for them.

All our teachers are equally respected and allowed to grow personally and academically not only through active teaching but also through professional development. Especially in these more uncertain times, the school has also provided staff counselling services if any personal or emotional challenges were to ever arise. Additionally, most of our teachers engage in the school sports teams, establishing time for friendship and well-being outside of teaching hours.

We are also delighted that our online teaching and learning programme has continued smoothly due to the full team of local and expatriate teachers’ continuous collaborative efforts. We are confident that our newer teachers together with our established teaching body will continue to bring fresh and enriching learning experiences to all our students. As the new school year approaches, we look forward to welcoming our new teachers into our school community.

Strong Leadership

The high level of satisfaction is also reflected in our school’s academic leadership team who came to YCIS Beijing as teachers many years ago. Our Western Vice Principal, Mr. James Sweeney, arrived at YCIS Beijing in 2015 holding the position of team leader at a variety of year levels before being appointed to the school leadership team in 2020. Ms. Jessica Sun, who begin teaching at our school almost twenty years ago, joined him as our Co-Principal at the beginning of 2021. Their combined years of experience and dedication toward YCIS Beijing form a strong foundation for our school’s academic leadership and both are looking forward to building upon their wealth of joint experiences in the future. This strong leadership base will ensure continuous high-quality bilingual education no matter if we are online or on campus.

We trust in our community, and we will continue to invest in our community, through our excellent teaching body, continued strong leadership, and reinforcing communication ties with our students and parents. Happy Global Community Day!