Our founders, Mr Poularas and Mr Speed, opened their first school in 1967 with a bold ambition to create a genuinely caring and engaged community with a strong sense of its role in the lives of the local and global families it served.
From those early beginnings, the core principles of community, positive change, excellence, and internationalism continue to guide ACS today.
An ACS education has at its heart the idea of readiness: when they leave ACS, our students face the world as effective, confident, and caring individuals who are ready to act, lead, care, and change the world.
At the highest level, our purpose is to inspire the world’s next global thinkers and doers. As we look to the future, ACS remains as true to its international education roots now as ever.
Our charitable mission
ACS Hillingdon is part of the ACS International Schools group, a dynamic, people-focused charity that advances education. ACS International Schools became a registered UK charity in 2018.
As a charity, ACS is committed to advancing education by providing a range of means-tested bursary places and working locally and internationally in collaboration with schools and communities to share expertise and resources to enrich the education of our partner communities and ourselves.
Our Core Values
ACS has five core values and is committed to living and working by these to ensure we achieve the aims and ambitions we hold for ourselves and our students.
Imagine Better
Welcome Everyone
Aim High & Make it Happen
Work Together
Act with Kindness
Student Learning Outcomes
By working to achieve the Student Learning Outcomes, we build the knowledge, understanding, skills, and dispositions that prepare our students to be ready for the future. This means that every ACS Hillingdon student is becoming:
An effective learner
A confident individual
A caring contributor
Education Strategy
ACS’s Education Strategy describes general intentions that reflect the desired position for our schools in 2025. Its principal objective is to increase the unique quality and value of the ACS educational experience. Through the strategy’s implementation, we will position the group to respond directly and creatively to geopolitical volatility in our markets and uncertainty in the premium independent international school sector.
The strategy aims to deepen an already solid foundation, driving key innovations that set the stage for extending our impact into the future.
Over the next five years, the Education Strategy intends to deliver significant change, including:
- A sharper focus on inspirational teaching that continually improves academic results.
- Demonstrated public benefit and global competence through a greater range of educational experiences.
- An expanded and carefully monitored notion of what it means to belong to a healthy international learning community.
- Equitable, distinctive, and systematically implemented support for all students to achieve challenging educational goals.
The strategy and its development are true to our “DNA”: an education hallmarked by quality, community, and internationalism.
Read our full educational strategy
