Our Own English High School - Girls, Sharjah

Start with the disambiguation, because it costs families real time. CBSE's affiliation register carries two Sharjah schools under the byte-identical name Our Own English High School, and tells them apart only by number: 6630015 and 6630063. This page is 6630015 - the girls' campus in Industrial Area 6, which SPEA files as school 177 and reaches at the mailbox [email protected], the -g- being the regulator's own way of solving the same problem. Its sibling, 6630063, is the boys' campus out at Juwaiza'a, and it has its own licence, its own principal, its own approved fee letter and its own page here. If you have been sent a fee table or an inspection grade for "Our Own Sharjah" with no branch attached, it is worth asking which of the two it described.

The school's own history page dates the founding to October 1982 - in Ajman, in temporary cabins - with a move into Sharjah in 1993 and the sale into GEMS Education in 2003. SPEA's register carries 01 October 1982 as the establishment date, so the 1982 claim is one of the rare school-history facts with a regulator's date stamp behind it. What grew out of it is unusually large. SPEA's 2022 Itqan review counted 5,677 pupils taught by 279 teachers and 30 teaching assistants, at a ratio of one to twenty, with 801 of those pupils on the special-educational-needs register. Every phase in that count is recorded as female - 855 in KG, 2,371 in Primary, 1,138 in Middle, 1,313 in High - which settles a question the school's own pages leave slightly open: this is a girls' school from the first year, not a mixed early years feeding a single-sex secondary.

The Itqan judgement was Very Good, awarded after a four-day visit on 7-10 November 2022, and it was a step up from the Good the school held in 2019. The reviewers singled out outstanding attainment in English, mathematics and science in the High phase, exemplary pupil behaviour, and the effect of the school's professional-development programme on teaching quality. The improvement they asked for was narrower than the praise: hold on to the gains, and tighten accountability for benchmark-test outcomes in Middle mathematics and science specifically. Note the date on that report. SPEA re-inspects schools rated Good or better every two to three years, so a 2022-23 grade is the current published one rather than a stale one - but it is four academic years old as you read it, and the roll it describes has almost certainly moved.

For a family choosing between the two campuses, the sharpest difference is not the rating - both are Very Good - but the subject map at Class 11 and 12. This campus publishes three streams: Science, Commerce and Humanities. The Humanities route pairs English Core with Political Science and then opens into History, Tourism, Sociology, Geospatial Technology, Psychology, Economics and Home Science, and the skill-subject list runs to Food Nutrition and Dietetics, Multimedia and Marketing. The boys' campus publishes Science and Commerce and no Humanities stream at all. A daughter who wants Political Science and Sociology at senior level has one Our Own campus available to her in Sharjah, not two, and that is a decision to make at Class 10 rather than discover at Class 11 registration.

On money, this page reproduces SPEA's own approved fee letter rather than a figure lifted from the school's brochure, because the regulator's letter is the document that binds. It runs from AED 8,350 in KG 1 to AED 16,115 in Class 12 for the 2025-26 year, tuition and books together, with uniform priced separately at AED 370 to 435. The school's own fees page publishes a 2026-27 schedule on a ten-instalment plan with a separate AED 500 admission fee, and the two documents will not agree line for line - SPEA's letter states an approved ceiling for the year it covers, the school's page states what it intends to bill next year across instalments. Read both, and treat the SPEA letter as the one to quote back if a bill surprises you.

The last thing worth knowing is where SPEA sits in the argument. Sharjah's regulator approves a fee increase only against the school's inspection rating, on a tiered scale, and a school that slips cannot raise fees at all. A Very Good school therefore has more headroom than an Acceptable one, which makes the Itqan grade a financial fact as much as an academic one. It also means the grade on this page is the thing to re-check before you sign for a second year, not the thing to read once at admission.