We are pleased to announce that on 1st July, 2020 Safari Kid International is rebranding its Dubai and Hong Kong schools.

Our nurseries and preschools will now operate under the name Kïdo in the UAE and Hong Kong, in line with our nurseries in the UK and preschools in the USA as part of our Kïdo Holdings Group (www.kido.education). Our India centres will continue to run under the Safari Kid name.

Our excellent teams in all our nurseries and preschools in Dubai and Hong Kong remain the same.

Kïdo (pronounced kee-doh) is the Japanese word for luminance. This new brand is a more accurate reflection of our vision – we believe that school should be a place to light up a child’s imagination and creativity. Everything we do is designed to ignite and magnify their passions.

We have already been running our proprietary teaching system, the Kïdo Early Years Program in Dubai and Hong Kong for over a year, blending the best insights from multiple philosophies, such as Montessori, Reggio Emilia and Multiple Intelligences.

The program covers a range of subjects, including literacy, maths, science and art, and uses thinking and problem-based learning to help children develop a diverse set of skills.

In a world where we can all access the same information through our smartphones, we want children to move beyond the obvious and have the ability to leverage knowledge and apply it in innovative ways to solve complex problems.

The Kïdo Early Years Program uses an enhancement of the British EYFS as an observation and assessment framework, adding new learning methods and areas of development. We also introduce development goals in areas such as the arts, technology, coding and robotics, as well as specific goals in literacy and mathematics.

Our curriculum was developed in-house by Thasin Rahim, our Chief Academic Officer, who lives in London and is also a Kïdo mum.
Thasin has an extensive background in early years education: in addition to Master’s Degrees in neuroscience, psycho-pedagogy and other disciplines, she is also a former teacher and nursery manager, who was nominated for the Varkey Foundation’s Global Teacher of the Year in 2016.Thasin is also part of our new panel of Curriculum Advisors, whose work inspired some of the thinking behind the Kïdo Early Years Programme. These advisors will continue to assist us over the next few years.

Dr. Robert Swartz
Robert is Director of the National Center for Teaching Thinking, USA. He received his doctorate from Harvard University and is an emeritus faculty member at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He is currently a member of the organising committee of the International Conference on Thinking (ICOT).

Robert is the co-author of Infusing Critical and Creative Thinking into Content Instruction, a series of lesson design handbooks, as well as the lead author of Thinking-Based Learning. His work is a core part of our thinking-based approach to the Kïdo curriculum.

Dr. Yuuko Tonkovich
Yuuko is the Associate Editor of the academic journal Applied Psycholinguistics. She received her doctorate from Harvard University and was a finalist for the International Reading Association Outstanding Dissertation of the Year, 2005.

Yuuko advises us on developing high-performing bilingual programmes for use in the early years.

As a sign of our commitment to the UK, Aniruddh Gupta, our Founder and Global CEO, moved to London with his family in July. The UK’s capital is now the international headquarters of the group.

We are also pleased to announce that we are franchising our offering across the United Kingdom and the rest of the world. Our franchise product includes branding and marketing, recruitment and training support, as well as our curriculum. It also includes our in-house, proprietary nursery management software system – iKïdo.