Our Own English High School - Boys, Sharjah

Two things about this school are routinely misreported, and both come from the same cause: it shares a name and a founding year with a school it is not. CBSE's register lists it as Our Own English High School, affiliation 6630063, with no branch marker at all. SPEA is more careful and licenses it as Our Own English High School - B1, school 167, and files it under Juwaiza'a. The 1982 date attached to "Our Own Sharjah" everywhere online belongs to the girls' school in Industrial Area 6. This campus has its own establishment date on SPEA's register, 1 August 2007, and its own history: a purpose-built boys' campus at Muwaileh Commercial from September 2007, and a move to the current Al Menhaz site in Juwaiza'a in April 2019. When someone tells you the boys' school has been running since 1982, they are describing the lineage, not the licence.

The second misreport is the roll. Aggregators quote figures ranging from 3,300 to over 5,000, and the higher numbers are the girls' campus wearing the wrong label. SPEA counted this school during a four-day Itqan review on 21-24 November 2022 and recorded 3,287 pupils, every one of them male: 353 in kindergarten, 1,156 in Primary, 1,048 in Middle and 726 in High. Staffing at that point was 164 teachers and four teaching assistants, a one-to-twenty ratio, ten per cent turnover, and 57 pupils on the special-educational-needs register. That last figure is the one worth holding next to the sibling school's 801 - not because either is right or wrong, but because two campuses of one operator can run inclusion at very different scales, and the difference will not show up in a brochure.

The Itqan outcome was Very Good, up from Good at the 2019 inspection. What the reviewers praised is specific enough to be useful: attainment in external and international examinations, the innovation work running through clubs and cross-curricular activity, health-and-safety compliance, the leadership team, and the expertise on the board of governors. Their improvement list included one item that reads oddly for a school this size and is worth quoting at an open day - strengthen curricular choice for the Phase 3 cohort, including industry internships. The school publishes the full report on its own site alongside a dedicated section covering accreditation, academic performance and university destinations, which is a level of self-disclosure the girls' campus does not match.

At Class 11 the offer narrows relative to its sibling and sharpens in a different direction. There are two streams here, Science and Commerce, and no Humanities route at all. Science runs Physics, Chemistry, Biology, English and Mathematics with a sixth subject chosen from Computer Science, Informatics Practices, Data Science or Applied Mathematics. Commerce runs Accountancy, Business Studies, Economics, English and Mathematics or Applied Mathematics, with Entrepreneurship as the optional sixth. Data Science and Entrepreneurship are on this campus's published lists and not on the girls'. So the two schools are not ranked versions of each other: one has the wider humanities offer, this one has the newer applied-subject options and the newer building.

Entry at senior level is more formal here than a family used to rolling admission expects. The school states that a Class 11 applicant must present Class 9 and Class 10 results plus pre-board marks and sit an admission test - not a screening conversation, a test. Registration opens in mid to late September for the following year; at the point of checking, 2026-27 was open for all grades except 10 and 12, with KG 2 through Class 11 limited to seats released by withdrawals. The published year runs as two semesters with an unusually precise hinge: 30 March to 9 October 2026, then 13 October 2026 to 31 March 2027.

On fees, the figures here are SPEA's, from the approved letter issued for licence B1, and they are not interchangeable with the girls' letter even though headline tuition on the two school websites is identical. SPEA approved AED 8,440 in KG 1 rising to AED 16,240 in Class 12 for 2025-26, tuition and books together; the girls' letter for the same year runs AED 8,350 to AED 16,115. The gap is small and the reason is mundane - different textbook and uniform allocations - but it demonstrates the principle that matters in Sharjah: the fee ceiling is set per licence, not per brand, and the tier a school may rise by at the next review is set by its Itqan grade. Very Good buys headroom. It is why the inspection grade and the fee letter belong on the same page.