Director General of Misk Schools, KSA
One of the leading figures in British international education talks to Andy Homden about his unconventional route into teaching and what he has learned since.
The art of leaving nothing to chance
Steffen Sommer loved school as a boy, and although his schooldays were quite tough, he respected his teachers and learned a lot. It was at school that he got his first inclination that teaching might be his thing. Learning came readily to him but what gave him real pleasure was helping his friends understand what he had already grasped quickly.
When his parents were posted overseas to Canada, he was sent to boarding school where he finished his last two years of secondary education. Nothing particularly unusual about any of this, you might think, for an educator who became a housemaster at a leading UK Boarding School (Rugby), Secondary Head at the British School of the Netherlands and the Director of two leading British International schools (the British School of Paris and Doha College). Except for the fact that Steffen Sommer grew up behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet Russia and boarded in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. What’s more, one of the seminal influences on his later career as a school leader was his time as an officer in the Soviet Army.
“Can you imagine? At 19, I was in command of a sniper platoon, leading a team of conscripts in their 30s. In circumstances like this you learn quickly!”
He made the most of all these experiences, which he accepts with something more than equanimity. He is someone who takes the cards he has been dealt and plays them as well as he can.
“There is no point in trying to change something that is beyond your control. Identify what you can influence and then do everything you can to effect the change you want. Leave nothing to chance.”
Polyglot
The young platoon commander made the most of his five years in the army which was his ticket to university in Leipzig where he studied languages. He is a true polyglot: Russian is his first language and when his parents moved to Azerbaijan, he quickly learned Azeri. He changed schools eight times, picking up languages as he went along. He is still in the habit: few heads of international schools in the Middle East have his facility with Arabic. An enviable skill.
End of the Cold War
Just as the Berlin wall came down in 1989, he graduated and found himself looking for a job at a time of great European uncertainty. He dared to go west – to Paris and Peugeot. Circumstances were kind – the motor trade needed Eastern Europeans with a facility for languages and who understood the culture to open up markets in the former Soviet Bloc:
“I got the job with Peugeot, even though I knew nothing about cars!”
He did well and was poised for a stellar career in industry. And then something (else) quite unexpected happened.
Into teaching
Peugeot was developing its Ryton plant at Coventry in the U.K. Steffen went across for the launch and found himself sitting next to the Headmaster of Rugby School at the reception dinner. He obviously made an impression.
“I assumed he was joking, but the Head said if I was ever interested in a job I should get in touch. I returned to Paris and of course forgot all about it, but a few months later Rugby was advertising. It was suggested I should apply. I did . . . and I got my first teaching job, taking my PGCE during my first year at Rugby”.
He loved it and was hooked on education from then on, and in particular, on British Education.
“Although this was the time that the National Curriculum was being introduced in the UK, I was truly astonished at the freedom a UK independent school had in setting its own curriculum. In Europe there is a kind of paranoia about education – it is so important it all has to be in the hands of the government. In Britain there was so much more freedom. I just admired the country for that. Its confidence.”
The inherent flexibility of the British system – for example in accommodating later developers – is one reason that he thinks British-style education has been so popular in international education.
High performance
He is deeply committed to the cause of ‘high performance’ and the purpose of education not only in his own school – but in any school:
“The outcome has to be that the next generation is optimally prepared for the job market and tertiary education market as it presents itself at the time when they enter it.”
He counts himself particularly lucky that he has not only been given the resources to prepare this next generation at Misk in the most thorough and innovative way possible, but also the influence to effect change in both private and government schools throughout the Kingdom.
This comes across as a duty – an imperative. And in preparing the next generation he thinks carefully about their future needs:
“Knowledge is getting more and more ephemeral and the likelihood is that what you learn today will only be 80% right the day after tomorrow.”
Therefore, at Misk, students are asked not only to learn things – but, perhaps, more importantly – to challenge knowledge, to keep asking questions and to be curious about what they don’t know.
“If they lose their curiosity, they have lost their career.”
Leadership development
He wants his students to take the initiative, to experience and live ‘leadership behaviour’ which he presents as the natural corollary of an inquiring mind. The biggest difference between the experience of the three-year-old students at Misk and his current Grade 12s is that the young ones, when they graduate, will have lived the leadership experiences now being structured for them at school for a full fifteen years.
“It will have a profound influence on their lives.”
Drive, vision, detail
After 30 years in British-style education he has lost none of his drive. He speaks passionately about a range of initiatives underway at the school – from the teacher training he supervises for ten of the brightest young graduates he can find in the country every year, to the accreditation of the Misk Diploma by Cambridge International Press and Assessment (with Stanford also welcoming the initiative) and the establishment of Olympian-style programmes for his students (Physics, Maths, Chess, AI) in which Misk students are already competing on a world stage. Very successfully.
He clearly has big picture vision, but, one feels, the success he has enjoyed depends at least as much on his acute and empathetic powers of observation. The significance of very few details escapes his notice. And then there is the energy.
“I do live and breathe this work. I avoid the frustration of negative stress but positive stress motivates me and gets the endorphins flowing. In this sense I relax in the job. And sport has always been important to me. I exercise every day and as a child of Russia, chess is never far away from my life.”
As a long-time member of the COBIS board (he is the vice-chair) Steffen is one of the best known and influential voices in British international education. After a compelling hour in his company, which just flew past, you can see why.
Dr. Steffen Sommer, Director General of Misk Schools in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, was talking to ITM’s Andy Homden.
All images & video: with kind permission from Misk Schools.
