����Vlog

“I never realised there was a world of international education where you could teach your subject as part of the British curriculum almost anywhere in the world.”

Robert Tarn, who spent 30 years working in education in England in a career that led him to be CEO of Northern Education Trust (NET), is reflecting on how different life was when he entered the teaching profession.

“I went from university back to the town where I grew up and became a teacher. I never thought about working overseas,” he says.

How times change. In the past 18 months Tarn has visited schools in Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Georgia, Jordan, Kazakhstan and Zanzibar within his role as CEO of GEMS School Management (GSM), part of international schools group GEMS Education. “There’s a lot of travel involved,” he adds.

Tarn joined GEMS in April 2025 after leading NET for seven years. While international education may not have been on his radar previously, he jumped in at the deep end, shunning the option of a comfortable leadership position in England’s academy system or even a role in which he had a predecessor to follow.

Big expansion plans at GEMS

Instead, his CEO role at GSM is entirely new for the business and part of a major strategy to grow the group’s presence in new markets by pivoting from a school owner-operator model in the UAE to being the education partner for major developments around the world.

For example, in Tbilisi, Georgia, GSM will oversee the staffing and day-to-day operations of a school being built as part of a residential development.

A similar deal was announced in August for Oman, and perhaps most eye-catching was a deal in Zanzibar to run a school as part of a big tourism development there.

Many more similar projects are likely to be revealed in the coming weeks. “Within our first 10 months of operation, we’re likely to be contracted for 10 GEMS-branded schools in nine different countries,” Tarn told ����Vlog earlier this year.

While these early schools are new “greenfield” sites, such as those noted above, Tarn says GSM is also in discussions in some parts of the world to potentially take over existing schools where there is scope to improve operations.

“I would say in our pipeline the vast majority are developers and investors that want to build new schools. But more and more, we’re partnering with funds and investors where part of the piece [is acquisition], so you’ve got that blend of immediate revenue generation and long-term growth,” he says.

Given this, Tarn says he has told his team that he wants “100 schools in the next three to four years” - which he acknowledges is huge growth and would actually take GSM to more than double the number of schools that GEMS operates in the UAE.

Lessons from MAT leadership

So, what do his new bosses - GEMS chairman Sunny Varkey and CEO Dino Varkey - think about his level of ambition?

“Everyone’s happy,” say Tarn. “If I gave the chairman a number and then added a zero on, he’d add another zero, right? I don’t think anybody will ever say to me ‘Rob, that’s enough’ or ‘Why don’t you slow down a bit?’”

This is perhaps why a recent change within GSM has been hiring more central team capacity, with regional managers for Central Asia, covering nations like Georgia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and for Africa and the Middle East joining the team.

“You need that local knowledge because I can read a lot about different countries, but when it comes to education, you can’t speak with authority unless you have an education specialist on the ground who can represent you,” Tarn says.

He adds that this situation has similarities with how he used to run NET, given the importance of ensuring that all schools within the multi-academy trust were given focus and considered with equal merit.

“There was a school in Bolton that was a three-hour drive there and three hours back, but you knew you had to do that legwork to ensure it was becoming a better school for the kids there,” Tarn reflects.

“So now I do think about my MAT and think, ‘What does that look like when you’re building a global network of schools?’ The difference now, though, is it’s not a three-hour drive to schools, it’s more like a three-hour flight to a different time zone.”

‘People make a lot about the difference between state and private education - it isn’t as big as you think’

Given GSM’s growth and the fact that it is now “in the phase of actually having to run schools”, Tarn has also appointed another former MAT executive - David Irish, who was previously at Shireland Collegiate Academy until December 2024 - as global director of education.

It’s a role that will involve him overseeing school improvement, educational strategy and academic excellence to help, in GEMS’ words, “support the growth and transformation of both new and existing schools internationally”.

Tarn has no intention of entirely delegating educational oversight of school performance, however, and admits he is looking forward to getting data from schools and keeping tabs on how they are performing, and getting back into one of his favourite things - school improvement.

“At the moment I’m building a what you might call global dashboard that will gather information, some of it automatically and some of it by self-reporting, on educational and non-educational data,” he says.

“So attendance, for example: what’s attendance? What about for boys versus girls? For disadvantaged pupils? And then things like, ‘We all did the same Year 9 geography paper in October, how do those results look across GSM?’ This is much the same as what I would have looked at across my MAT.”

Feel the fear - and do it anyway

Even with his MAT experience to call on, though, there is no doubt that Tarn has taken on a role with a huge remit and that, given his lack of international experience, it could easily have been a step too far - perhaps even a risky one that meant him ending his career on a dud note.

Tarn says this fear factor was part of the thrill of taking on the role.

“I say to people all the time, ‘When was the last time you were scared at work?’ I don’t mean physically scared, I mean out of your comfort zone, feeling you had imposter syndrome, you were being challenged to think in a way you hadn’t thought before.

“Because I think if you could honestly say the last time I learned anything new was several years ago, the last time I felt really nervous at work, that I didn’t know what I was doing…those are the times that you grow as a leader.”

It was these sort of reflections that meant when the call came from Sunny Varkey for the GSM role, he was ready to move on.

“We had the MAT summary evaluation at Northern Education Trust, where all the schools that had been inspected under us were finally ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’,” he says.

“I think, looking back, that marked the time when I’d achieved in that job what I needed to achieve, and it was time to get outside my comfort zone again.”

Something totally different

Did that have to entail leaving the state system, though? Surely there were plenty of jobs on offer in England that could have pushed him out of his comfort zone?

Tarn says the reality was he was at the point in his career where it was either “time to retire” or do something totally different.

“My wife and I have always wanted to spend some time living abroad, not least so that my two children can experience different cultures and opportunities,” he said when his appointment was announced last year.

What’s more, he acknowledges that while in the past he had a view that “private education was a very elite thing”, his time at GSM has changed this perception.

“People make a lot about the difference between state and private or independent education. It isn’t as big as you think,” Tarn says.

“What I’ve learned in the last year is [all schools] are just buildings with teachers and children in them - it is always down to leadership, and the same systems, the same processes and the same leadership strategies would work in any school.

“They’ll work in Zanzibar and they’ll work in Sunderland.”

The fact that GEMS has no entrance requirements for many of its schools and that they do a “wonderful job for children with special educational needs”, including his own son, who is autistic, are also positives for him.

“You realise this is not the world that you thought it was when you were a young teacher in a state school,” he says.

Joining the club

In fact, Tarn is now such a convert that he says he has told “a number” of former MAT colleagues to “definitely experience [international education] before you retire”.

“I think you’ll regret not getting out in your comfort zone and going through another learning curve, as I have,” he says.

MAT leaders looking for a new challenge have been a good well to draw from for GEMS in the past 24 months, with Lisa Crausby joining from Star Academies in summer 2024 and Nick Soar from the Harris Federation appointed to a Dubai headship in June this year.

Add to this the likes of former UK schools minister Nick Gibb, who chairs the advisory board for GSM, and former Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman, who is on its academic advisory board, and it seems clear that GEMS is pushing hard to strengthen its position across the world.

Tarn, though, says it’s the teachers making the move overseas that really inspire him and show him how much things have changed since he first became a teacher.

“I really admire those young teachers who take the leap to come out to places like Dubai for their teaching career, because I never would have imagined when I started teaching to even explore the possibility.”