I have just finished three extremely full days of meetings at Atlantic College (or, as it is more fully and correctly known, the United World College of the Atlantic) in Wales.  Twice each year, the International Board of the United World Colleges meets, and all the Heads of the Colleges attend the meeting.  Associated with the main meeting are several committee meetings, and the ones with which I was involved were the Heads’ Committee, the Education Committee and the National Committees Development Committee.  The International Board and associated committee meetings rotate through the various colleges in the United World College movement, and this time it was the turn of Atlantic College to host the meetings.

The venue was a fitting and a pleasant one.  Located in a spectacular 12th century castle overlooking the Bristol Channel on the south coast of Wales, Atlantic College was the first United World College.  In many ways, it provided the inspiration and the educational model that has since been replicated across the world, including at my own College in Hong Kong.

It takes quite a bit to make me feel tired, but I have to confess that after these three days of meetings I am well and truly ready for a good sleep.  I have been getting up each morning at 6:00 am to answer the overnight e-mails, shower and have breakfast before leaving for the College on a bus at 7:50 am.  The meetings and functions have run from 8:30 am to 11:00 pm, meaning that I (like the other Heads) returned to our hotel by bus at 11:30 pm, at which time we (or at least, I) sat down to attend to the flood of e-mails that had arrived during the day.

Just as truth is the first casualty of war, sleep and exercise seem to be the casualties of these meetings!

And yet, as always, the effort was worth it without any doubt whatsoever.  These meetings are always extremely stimulating, as one would expect when about 40 of the world’s top educators and various supporters of the

Colleges assemble together to discuss strategic, developmental and educational issues (a few of the attendees are shown in the image to the left, getting ready to begin the next session).  No brief description of the meetings in a blog such as this could do justice to the range of issues covered or the high quality of the discussions held.  Suffice to say that among the tens of matters covered there were discussions on such varied topics as opening new colleges, widening access to UWC education, scholarship arrangements, establishing more consistent branding, fund raising, planning for the UWC 50th anniversary in 2012, fine tuning the College self-evaluation processes, examining ways to get greater consistency across the colleges, and so on.  During the meeting, each College has an opportunity to deliver a report on the previous year, and for the first time this year, there were three parts to each College’s report - a statistical overview, a written narrative and a spoken report.

One of the important functions of the Heads’ meeting every October is to allocate the scholarship offers for the coming year among the 120 or so national Committees across the world.  Each College prepares a preliminary allocation of scholarships a few weeks before the meeting, which is sent to the International Office in London to be compiled into one document.  These draft offers are then discussed at the meeting to ensure a fair and appropriate distributions of scholarship offers across the world.  As always, this process was a good

opportunity to share experiences and aspirations, as well as serving as a powerful reminder of the fundamental purpose of our existence - to provide the means to bring together talented young men and women from all parts of the world and educate them in an all-round manner to the highest standards so that they will be equipped to go forth and make positive and meaningful changes to the world in the future.

When I visit the various UWCs for these meetings, I always try and capture some photographs that I can use to share the experience of my visit to the College to anyone interested, especially to students who are thinking of applying to one or another UWC in the future.  The weather on this visit was much kinder to me than the last time I visited Atlantic College, and so I did manage to get some photos, a few of which appear in this blog (you can click to enlarge any of the images).  More significantly, I have added 28 of the photos I took to the earlier small gallery I had posted previously on this website, and the whole collection can be seen HERE.  I encourage you to click the link and view the images of this beautiful and spectacular campus.