Dear Smiling Families,

Here we are almost at the end of the school year. It has gone by in the blink of an eye, it is already time for Sports Day!

A year of major changes that the Smiling staff have faced, assimilated and adopted. As you can imagine, it has not all been easy, we have had a few difficulties and a lot of work has been done; I am happy to say that I would make the choice I made last year all over again. We are part of a group of International Schools, Ingenium Education, which has broad horizons and invests in our children and their future.

We confirm the management’s commitment to maintaining the highest quality standards. In fact, we are proud to announce that from September new international professionals will join our team of teachers: Ms Morgan Rosie, a native speaker primary teacher from Australia, Mr Andrew Panozzo, English for secondary and IB, Ms Kerrin McGlashan, mathematics for secondary, also from Australia. We have asked them to introduce themselves now to the community they will soon join.

Attached you will find the presentations written by themselves.

We want to continue to invest in the well-being of our pupils. From the next school year, our students will have new sports facilities, a new multi-purpose court – five-a-side football, volleyball – and plenty of extra green space from the start of the next school year. We are also equipping the gymnasium for new sports activities for the younger ones. First among many the climbing wall.

Our technological equipment is also being enriched with state-of-the-art computer tools. We want to implement the use of EdTech to give our pupils the digital skills they need today to meet the challenges of tomorrow. We have finally found and decided to also adopt English textbooks (e.g. Oxford University Press) that will make it easier for our Italian and international students to study; for those subjects whose syllabuses are not found in English textbooks, we will produce our own digital texts and materials.

In December 2022, the Smiling University Fair took place at our premises in Corso Ercole d’Este, a week of meetings with prestigious Italian and international universities that presented their educational programmes to our high school students. A number of important representatives of the business world took part in an interesting debate with our students. Following the Fair, we organised a visit to Temple University, the Accademia Costume e Moda, Luiss University and the Swiss School of Management for students who wanted to..

It is our goal to continue to develop a project that enhances the interests and predispositions of each student, not only informing them on which universities to attend to reach their goals, but also enabling them to learn about the professions of the future, in an ever-changing global reality.

Finally, we are committed to creating new opportunities for our students such as exchange programmes, meetings and competitions with schools in our group, trips abroad, and events for parents as well. By mid-October you will have the programme for the 2023 – 2024 school year.

We have a band, a choir, a chess club; in our Corso Ercole d’Este gymnasium we dance the Capoeira and in the Porta Mare gymnasium we practise sports dancing.

Many other projects are in the pipeline and we are all working towards realising them!

I look forward to seeing you at Sports Day to wish each other a wonderful summer.

Un saluto cordiale

Caterina Azzini