Adam Beeson

Adam Beeson is Strategic Enrollment Director at New Summit Academy Costa Rica, a supportive boarding school and study abroad experience for high school students, and The Bridge Costa Rica, a supportive gap program for young adults. He brings nearly two decades of international school teaching and leadership experience in Europe and the Americas.

In February 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine turned my world upside down. Although I moved to the UK in 2004, to study and become a primary school teacher, I was born in Zaporizhzhia, a Russian-speaking industrial city in southeastern Ukraine. When the invasion began, my first instinct was to rush back to Ukraine and help in any way I could.

Al Ain British Academy is small by UAE standards, with 1,000 pupils, including just 300 in the secondary school. Just under 70 per cent of the population are Emirati, with a healthy minority of expats from a wide range of countries. Prior to the pandemic, the school, which was much smaller then, had not run any international visits. So one of my aims, on arriving at the school in 2021, was to harness the developmental power of school trips. The challenges of starting a trips programme were numerous.