Vision

Our vision is to nurture globally aware Chinese citizens rooted in their own heritage yet passionate about their engagement with the wider world.

HD Schools are centred around Chinese families where Chinese values are fully embedded. We believe that the essence of education is to establish a connection between ourselves, the wider world and the society of the future.

We focus on exploring innovative models of integration in a bilingual environment, giving Chinese children the ability and confidence to cooperate with others across cultures whilst maintaining their own roots, thus becoming globally competitive and resilient individuals with the awareness to make wise judgements and to commit to a lifelong love of learning.

Key Features

The key paths that we will follow to realise our vision are:

• A tailored education system to help each student find their inner drive, search for and identify their personal goals and achieve their full potential.           
• A comprehensive rollout of the Chinese Integrated Curriculum, featuring broad themes and interdisciplinary content, giving children the self-awareness to shape their own cultural identity whilst understanding others.
• The creation of a multi-disciplinary and immersive international curriculum to foster cross-cultural understanding and collaboration amongst global citizens.       
• Comprehensive data-driven monitoring and evaluation systems to nurture excellence and instil confidence over a broad range of subjects.
• An innovative Design Thinking methodology to teach children empathy, critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

A self-evolving learning community equipped with the curiosity, mentality and the ability to perform to high standards. 

Values

In order to turn our vision and mission into reality, we consider it essential to nurture values that all members of the HD community identify with and can easily implement. Furthermore, we recognise that schools are just a part of the educational ecosystem and that a child’s development is closely linked to their families, to the wider community and to the educational platform around us as well as to our own teachers and staff. Therefore we have chosen to adopt values as that can be readily aspired to by all, values that have survived thousands of years of human history and are widely reflected in both and Chinese and international traditions. Our core values, as set out in the classic Chinese text In Moderation, are ‘Wisdom’, ‘Empathy’ and ‘Courage’: HD’s ‘virtues without borders’.

Wisdom

Wise people are defined indeed not by their intelligence but by their wisdom: can we use our wisdom to find our inner self? Do we understand and accept that self? Do we understand and embrace our world of diversity? When facing differences, change and uncertainties, let us not be anxious, let us not be dismissive, but let us learn instead how to accommodate and to adapt with inner calm and self-confidence.      

Empathy   

Those with a kind heart are often said to have no enemies. That is because kindness begins with understanding and empathy. Let us learn to value view ourselves on the basis of sound inner choices rather than the external judgements of others. We understand others and the world through empathy. Often the most irresistible of weapons in our efforts to be caring, considerate and grateful are sincerity, warmth and benevolence. We believe these permeate our organisation.

Courage         

Courage is born from a sense of conviction: armed with faith and purpose we become fearless. However, faith and purpose may not, on their own, always be enough: our world is not perfect and the road to realising our dreams is typically filled with obstacles. We must develop the courage to seek responsibility ahead of privilege, to practise good habits, to change by learning from others; to persevere and one day achieve our goals.

Motto

Underpinning our vision, mission and values lies our motto:

‘Studia abeunt in mores’. ‘HD Schools: where education creates character.’

Derived from the Latin of Ovid’s Heroides, this motto is centuries old yet acutely relevant to the challenges of the 21st century. It can be variously translated but has at its core the notion that good practices embedded in youth nurture passions, habits and moral values that sustain the adult, enrich relationships and last a lifetime.