Harrods International Academy (HIA) is proposing 2 programmes addressing Early Years and Primary Years with three campuses. The opening of the Early Campus on Street 352 will be fully dedicated to children from 18 months to five years old in the IEYC stream in Cambodia. HIA also follows two programmes; international and bilingual.

The International Programme is a full day British-Singaporean curriculum comprising of IPC (International Primary Curriculum)/IEYC (International Early Year Curriculum) and Singapore math and English as a Second Language (ESL) taught in English. The bilingual Programme is a full day combination of half day Khmer programme compliant with the Cambodia National curriculum from the Ministry Education, Youth and Sports taught in Khmer as well as a half day International Programme

In addition to education, the school incorporates a unique mix of multiple extra-curricular activities for after school such as Tae Kwon Do, Yoga, Music, Swimming, Khmer and Chinese among others. “We believe that each child is unique. The IPC/IEYC way of teaching is ensuring that each child is given personal goals which will allow them to grow on specific areas of development such as responsibility, communication, respect, cooperation, enquiry, adaptability, resilience and thoughtfulness,” said Mateea Petrescu, english principal of HIA.

The HIA way of teaching is based on providing the right level of knowledge, skills and understanding for all our students to be able to succeed equally in English and in Khmer. The assimilation of any language allows one to better understand a culture. It is a skill that one day or another will be helpful in life.

“We are making Mandarin Chinese part of both our international and bilingual Programmes, where last year it was only an option available in the bilingual Programme,” commented Chendamorny Pen, Khmer principal of HIA.

Plans are to extend HIA into Secondary School and that will be starting from this new school year.

On speaking of the success of HIA, Petrescu and Pen concluded “since inception, parents have demonstrated great support to our school and recognising the level of learning we are able to provide to our students, which means that what we have done in a short time is right. Therefore we are planning big with the opening of more campuses. We have crafted a five year development plan which should bring the total number of our students to between 1,500 and 2,000 which compares to the 400 students we have today.”