As part of the celebrations of WAB's 30th Anniversary this weekend, we looked into our archive and to find this story of our schools beginnings, written by WAB founder, Hilary Munro. Originally written for our 20th anniversary in 2014, we were excited to share this story again for our 30th year.

“Are there no more ‘likelies’ Michael?” we asked co-founder Michael Crook. ‘No, not really,’ he replied, “Only this one at the No. 3 Textile Company off the Fourth Ring Road. It’s probably not worth going there.”

And so we nearly didn’t.

We stepped from bone-cold Beijing into green humidity and banana trees with grey buildings and dusty bare trees just visible through dirty
glass. For months the phones had rung off the hook for co-founders Sabina Brady and Michael, leading us into some very unlikely or awkward locations. At last, despite being a bit surreal, we knew we had found WAB!

One month earlier, on January 7, 1994, we had received permission from Li Lan Qing, Vice Premier of the State Council, responsible for Education, to found a private school for foreign nationals using a foreign curriculum, with foreign ownership. Back then, all foreign children were educated in either schools run by Diplomatic Missions under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or Chinese schools using a Chinese curriculum.

As a result of China’s Open Door Policy, by the ‘90s, the diplomatic schools main clientèle, especially those offering Western English-language curricula, were no longer the children of their missions alone, but also those of non-diplomatic foreign nationals. By 1993, the school of choice, the International School of Beijing, a school with 625 student places for ages 4 to 18, had a  waitlist of over 215. The only alternatives were the Montessori School of Beijing for ages 2 to 8, and the International Study Group for ages 5 to 14, both small schools with long waiting lists.

Clearly, those were unprecedented times, scarcely recognisable in 21st century Beijing with its plethora of internationally accredited schools and world-class setting.

With schools bursting at the seams, companies, and embassies were finding it increasingly difficult to attract the right staff, and many expatriate executives and diplomats with families refused to move to Beijing. Obviously, this also impacted China’s high-speed economic development.

It was clear that more officially recognized international schools were urgently needed. We felt it keenly. Sabina's and my children were lucky to be enjoying a world-class education at ISB.

We knew what we wanted: the vision and drive from the start was to set up an international English medium school following a truly international curriculum, child-centred and open to all students irrespective of passport, ability or creed. We wanted to give the children of foreign nationals a different choice from the national curricula and pedagogy available in Beijing then (and now).

Looking back, the dream, and our complete conviction that it was achievable in less than a year, was a bit crazy. Sabina and I were just two ordinary individuals without any background in school administration. We quickly hooked in Michael, who immediately understood and shared our vision and was also fully bilingual, well networked in the Chinese community, and a teacher to boot.

We lacked almost everything, but especially funding; a director and teachers; desks, tables, chairs, books; IT (hardware and software) – and the point of it all, students. We needed credibility from corporate backing and an international education provider. With just a bare seven months until September 1, 1994, when WAB would first open its doors for students from 3–12 years old, the clock was ticking.

On June 25, 1993, I invited the ISB Director at that time, David Eaton, to the British Chamber of Commerce to debate the Beijing expat schooling crisis and to set out the stall to hopefully attract corporate backing. By September, we had the firm backing of GE, Motorola and Royal Dutch Shell, and their corporate executives giving valuable advice on WAB’s pre-board.

We targeted Li Lan Qing for permission to start the school and sought from the international diplomatic community. The response from the embassies was immediate. The Head of the World Bank agreed to present our petition; Canada, Australia, Zambia, Finland, Israel, Jordan, the Netherlands, South Africa, Switzerland, The United States of America, and South Korea all signed. BP, Eastman Chemicals, EG&G, First National Bank of Chicago, GE, Glaxo, HSBC, Maersk Shipping, Motorola, Northern Telecom, Shell, Walls Unilever, and Xian Janssen all threw their weight behind it. In December 1993 the petition was hand-delivered to the Chinese Ministry of Education and on January 7, 1994, we received written permission to found a school.

At the same time, we also approached the European Council for International Schools (ECIS, later CIS), an international not-for-profit accreditation body, for assistance in recruiting a director and teachers, and advice on fundraising strategies. In early December 1993, CIS sent out an evaluation team, generously offered all assistance, and recommended WAB’s founding Director, Ian Rysdale, one of the founding members of the IB PYP curriculum.

For the legal framework we set up a private trust in Hong Kong – WABEF (WAB’s Educational Foundation) – that allowed us to get the all-important seals in Shenzhen, to get the chop and seals in Beijing so we could open bank accounts, recruit staff and run the school.

It was not until the beginning of February that we came across those banana trees and WAB’s first home. Ronan Cassidy, our Shell Representative at the time, remembers, “spending the weekends wandering around disused factory sites in the freezing Beijing winter trying to find potential sites for the school.”

Our dream site was derelict. It needed plenty of imagination to see libraries, sunlit rooms, students playing football on the pitch, and a child-friendly, warm and inviting, educational environment. As Sabina Brady (co-founder) recalled, “Colin [my husband] drew the vision on poster-sized paper to show our pre-board members and later prospective parents of what WAB could become -- despite the actual reality of a worn-out factory office building, no electricity, a bumpy field full of rocks, and a long entry that went past nearly shuttered factory workshops.”

The factory site required considerable conversion into a modern school. Antonio Ochoa, architect and designer of the factory site recalls that the first floor was divided into small offices with a typical corridor down the middle. Antonio asked about the structure. “Supporting walls which can’t be removed,” was the reply. This lack of flexibility would be a problem. He was told there were no original drawings. The second floor was almost identical to the first, but the third and fourth floors were empty with no furniture – and crucially no interior walls. “The building was a columns-and-beams structure, it was the most amazing thing...” said Antonio.

Transforming the grey drab buildings resulted in a kaleidoscope of colour, “purples and blues, greens of all hues making for such a bright start to our children’s lives”, Ian fondly recalls.

Sometime in March 1994, during a long evening session, the name “Western
Academy of Beijing” was born, representing our English curriculum and pedagogy with high international rigour, but without
using the misused word ‘International’ or indeed ‘School’ itself to differentiate ourselves from all the other schools in Beijing.

The rest, as they say, is history. We opened our doors on September 1, 1994, with 147 students. Jo Sargent, one of the founding teachers remembers, “In the first year the number of students doubled after Christmas break, so it felt like we were starting again in a way.’ WAB faced the familiar Beijing schooling phenomenon of high demand and growth from the start. Within six years, we had 596 students and in August 2001 we moved into our current purpose-built campus. To ensure WAB’s intimate, child-centered approach, our Nursery, Elementary, Middle and High Schools were built as separate but contiguous facilities within green, shared spaces. Student numbers were, and continue to be, capped to foster a small school feel with one WAB ethos. Twenty years later, WAB has blossomed into a school with 14 grade levels and nearly 1,500 students.

The school opening for WAB was a cliffhanger to the last minute! “Containers arriving on the very last night before the first day of school,” said First Director, Ian Rysdale, “with parents, teachers, students and Board members carrying desks, chairs, books and resources
up and down three levels”. Looking through the WAB box that has accompanied me throughout my many postings since then, I came across a letter sent to the World Bank and the UN asking for assistance to get our furniture and books out of customs. With their help the boxes arrived over the two days before the school opened. I was uncrating boxes of chairs on the driveway when all of the Hook family, newly arrived that week from the United States, cycled in to lend a hand.

Physical pitching in to help the school continued to be a feature of the first year. Clearing rocks from the sports field and planting trees to create a windbreak made a deep impression on Ian, Michael Crook, co-founder, FaRen DaiBiao and WAB teacher, and one of WAB’s founding students, Leslie Hook. She recalls “It is all a bit hazy in my mind as I was just ten, but I remember picking up rocks from the soccer pitch during PE class, the Spring garden project, learning Simon & Garfunkel songs in music class and our incredible Albanian gymnastics teacher.”

Michael adds, “There was a barbed wire fence around the field making it look very stark. We decided trees should be planted along the boundary wall so we chose leylandi, to provide green all year round, and poplars
to provide shade in the summer. The trees were pretty cheap and native to North China. The leylandii were prickly and a bit of a nuisance to plant, but the poplars were easy. On Tree Planting Day a truck load of slim saplings arrived, no more than 3m
tall, and were planted along the north and west boundary of our new field by WAB’s first students and teachers. Some months ago I went by the old school, and found it is now an annex of Huajiadi School. I also found some of those poplars, now several stories high with broad, strong trunks!”

It was not all work though. Ian began the first tree planting with the words “This is where we start!” as Michael ran flying a kite across the rocky field trailed by WAB students, and the rest of the school community.

New parent Kwok To Yue wrote recently, “One thing that impressed me was to see Ian Rysdale out in the field holding a bell and welcoming students (and parents) every morning. He would address each student by name. Sometimes teachers were there too. WAB’s environment was so welcoming that both girls were excited to be at school.”

It was of course a new school for the teachers too. Jo Sargent noted, “In those days we teachers were regularly invited to foreign expert functions at the Great Hall of the People with Michael Crook. I remember being a bit surprised when he just stopped his cranky but faithful Chinese car in the middle of the road and said it was fine to leave it here as there was nowhere else to park – this was long before clamping came into force. After an extravagant dinner, we wandered back to the car which was still in the same spot with other cars zooming around it on either side!”

Ian captured the zing of those early days in a letter to me on November 3, 1994: “Time has flown by since the opening day. The community has been terrific, and last night’s UN International Food Festival was a sell-out. Enrollment is increasing and we are up to 155 students with at least 15 more expected to start in January.”

Around this time we, as Trustees of WAB’s Educational Foundation (WABEF) decided to hand over the reins of running the
school to WAB’s new parents. Kwok To Yue, David MacDonald, and Antoine King stepped up to be founding WAB Board Members, along with four WABEF Trustees, Sabina, Michael, Gordon Gurr, and Steven Carroll. “The first Board Meeting started early in the evening and ended shortly past midnight. There were just so many things to cover for a new school,” commented Kwok To Yue – who has remained involved with WAB and is currently Chair of WABEF.

These days I doubt that our dream would even get off the drawing board. The barriers to entry would simply be too high. Huge for-profit educational organizations dominate, as international schools are big business. Opening an international school in Beijing today would need much more than the US$1.1 million that WAB started with. As Sabina Brady, co-founder, accounts for it like this, “We faced a serendipitous confluence of events that we did not cause, but were able to harness and take full advantage of.”

It is testimony to the unusual times of Beijing in1993, that three individuals with virtually no credentials could achieve considerable corporate backing from Shell, Motorola and GE, combined with the support and expertise from their top executives: Peter Burri and Ronan Cassidy (Shell), Jason Lum (Motorola) and Steve Carroll (GE). Indeed these corporations continued to provide executives to the Founding Board until May 2008.

The unstinting support and help from the expatriate diplomatic and corporate communities underpinned the whole project and ensured its success, and still does.

We were driven by a vision of a school providing a child-centered education encouraging a passion for self-discovery and life-long learning – those hackneyed cliche?s trotted out by schools. But we believed in it and still do. In our school, every child would be valued and nurtured to achieve their individual potential.

Twenty years on, did we achieve our vision? “Perhaps that is not possible, we are WAB’s severest critics as we should be,” says Sabina. But those experiencing WAB appear to be enthusiastic, and that is at least a measure. Ronan Cassidy, now VP of HR Shell, recently wrote, “A Dutch colleague in China was waxing lyrical about how good WAB was the other day...which was rather nice to hear!” SarahYe, a founding student, now responsible for China market strategy and business development for a U.S. start-up company wrote, “Even though the new campus was beautiful and brand new, I missed terribly all the funky charm and character of our old factory campus. It was a great place to go to school.” And did we achieve a child-centered education encouraging a passion for self-discovery and life-long learning? Impossible to know without much research and evaluation of course, but two WAB founding alumni, Leslie Hook and Shannon MacDonald, did precisely achieve this.

Leslie, now a Financial Times reporter in Beijing after a sabbatical at Harvard University writes: “Mrs Nojack’s classroom was like a magical land where (as a ten-year-old) it often felt like we were playing as much as learning. We were a very small group, maybe a dozen students, and there were different corners of the classroom devoted to different activities so you could roam around during free time, sit in the reading corner, or go do math puzzles, my favorite activity.”

Shannon, currently studying for an MBA at Saint Thomas University, Minneapolis writes: “WAB had a great impact on me and was a major reason I went to Macalester College for the school’s Asian Studies major. After college, I moved to Egypt and received my Master's in Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo while working for AMIDEAST, an international education and training non-profit organization. I left Cairo in 2010 and served as an AmeriCorps volunteer teaching literacy skills to elementary students at a magnet art school in the Twin Cities. I think that what I learned at WAB informed all of these academic and professional decisions, and influenced my decisions to continue learning and working towards bettering my community.”

We could not have anticipated the impact WAB would have in China over these years. WAB’s vocational teachers’ passion for life-long learning led to collaboration with Chinese educational authorities to develop Chinese international and private school accreditation. Founding teachers joining from The International School of Tanzania, invited Dr Jane Goodall and helped to establish the international environmental movement, Roots and Shoots, in China. Even the choice to introduce Apple computers has resulted in WAB being recognized as an Apple Distinguished School for innovation, leadership, and educational excellence. Clearly, WABness is contagious!

So I would like to congratulate WAB on its 20th Anniversary. At this end note it is fitting to honor my two co-founders, Sabina Brady and Michael Crook, and the trustees on the WAB Educational Foundation Board: Jim Morrison, Kwok To Yue, Phil Tregaskis, David Wang. It is in no small part due to all of these people that our crazy conviction blossomed into this school.

Finally, though I salute the dedicated hard work of WAB’s School Board, the students, parents, teachers, and non-teaching staff who embody the vision of this amazing school and without whom there would be no school at all.