Product Used
Case Study
“One Place They Go To”: How ManageBac+ Brought Fairgreen International School’s Secondary IB Programmes Together
Dubai
Shannon Johnson
By putting everything under ManageBac, it’s helped because the students really have one place that they go to to figure it out.
How Fairgreen Uses ManageBac+
MYP, DP & CP Management
CAS & Service as Action
Student Portfolio
API Integrations
In This Story
Fairgreen International School opened in Dubai’s Sustainable City in January 2019 with around 400 students. Today it serves close to 1,100 and offers all four IB programmes. As the school grew, so did the number of tools staff used to teach and keep families informed.
An All-IB School, Built Around Its Community
Fairgreen is one of 10 schools in the ESOL Education group. It is an all-IB school, offering the Primary Years Programme, the Middle Years Programme, the Diploma Programme, and the Career-related Programme. ManageBac+ runs its three secondary programmes: the MYP, DP, and CP.
Joseph Nettikaden, Chief Information Officer at ESOL Education, has watched the school grow from around 400 students at launch to close to 1,100 today. For him, the numbers are only part of the story.
What makes Fairgreen truly unique is the community itself: the beliefs, the principles, and how we participate in evolving Dubai’s landscape.
Joseph Nettikaden
Chief Information Officer, ESOL Education
Serving a community of that size takes systems that keep up. That is where Fairgreen’s work with Faria comes in.
From Several Tools to One Place
In Fairgreen’s early years, teaching and family communication ran across more than one tool. Shannon Johnson, MYP Coordinator, saw what that meant for students: too many places to look for what they needed.
Moving everything into ManageBac+ changed that.
For a school that has nearly tripled in size, a single starting point for secondary students matters more with every year group added.
Built for the IB, from CAS to Community Engagement
Shannon is clear that ManageBac+ fits the way an IB school works. The requirements of each programme are already part of the platform.
ManageBac is really well designed for the IB program because it has what you need to manage CAS at the DP level, service learning for CP, and then Service as Action, which is progressing into community engagement next year with the enhanced MYP. ManageBac has all these things already built in.
Shannon Johnson
MYP Coordinator
That matters as the IB’s own frameworks change. Fairgreen can follow the shift to community engagement in the enhanced MYP without looking for a new tool.
The bigger payoff comes later. Because students record their service, activities, and experiences in one place, ManageBac+ builds a record of their whole secondary journey.
It actually starts to create a portfolio for the student over their full secondary school. That can be really powerful by the time they’re in Grade 12 and they start applying to universities.
Shannon Johnson
MYP Coordinator
Less Manual Work, More Accurate Data
Fairgreen runs three Faria products: ManageBac+ for teaching and learning, SchoolsBuddy for activities, and OpenApply, its most recent addition, for admissions. Syeed Arfat, IT Manager, looks after how they fit with the rest of the school’s systems.
The APIs in ManageBac+ and OpenApply let Syeed connect them to the school’s other systems. That has cut repetitive data entry and the mistakes that come with it.
With the help of the APIs that ManageBac and OpenApply have given us, I’m able to integrate multiple systems. That has reduced a lot of manual work for us, and the data is accurate because there is no human error.
Syeed Arfat
IT Manager
His verdict on the set-up is simple: “To be frank, we are really happy with all three systems.”
Giving Families a Clear View of Admissions
For Sam Dillow, Admissions Director, OpenApply was about changing the experience for families, not only for the admissions office.
Part of the reason we chose OpenApply was to streamline how we worked with families. We wanted to give them more agency in the process.
Sam Dillow
Admissions Director
Visibility was the gap. Families going through admissions wanted to know where their application stood, and the old process made that hard to show them.
Parents really value the fact that they can see where they are in the process, which is something that we really struggled with before.
Sam Dillow
Admissions Director
One Partner from Admissions to Graduation
At Fairgreen, Faria’s products cover a large part of the student journey. Families apply through OpenApply. Students then learn, track their service, and build their university portfolio in ManageBac+, alongside SchoolsBuddy. Behind the scenes, APIs keep the data flowing with less manual effort.
For a school that grew from 400 to 1,100 students in a few years, that combination of one place for students, a clear view for families, and accurate data for IT is what lets the systems keep pace with the community.
To learn more about ManageBac+, OpenApply, or SchoolsBuddy, book a demo with our team today.
Ready to See ManageBac+ in Action?
Empower your school to unify curriculum, teaching, and reporting.
