Alice Smith School
| Motto | Sic Itur Ad Astra ("In This Way You Shall Go to the Stars") |
|---|---|
| Established | 1946 |
| Type | Mixed, Day British International School |
| Location |
Malaysia Coordinates: 3°07′41″N 101°42′01″E / 3.1281°N 101.7003°E |
| Students | Approximately 1,600 students |
| Gender | Co-educational |
| Ages | 3–18 |
| Houses | 4 |
| Colours | White and dark green |
| Website | alice-smith |
The Alice Smith School, established since 1946 in Malaysia is one of the oldest British international schools in Asia. The school is a not-for-profit educational foundation situated on two campuses. The Primary Campus is at Jalan Bellamy and the Secondary Campus on Jalan Equine.
The Alice Smith School follows the English National Curriculum with a strong international flavour. In 2011, the school was one of the first in Asia to be fully accredited as a British School Overseas by the Department for Education in London. 'Excellent' was the grade given in the most recent British Schools Overseas report for both the Primary and Secondary School Campuses by Tribal, a DfE approved inspectorate.
Its three-year rolling average for A Level A*-B results is 78% and the school's value-add score for academic attainment puts it in the top 6% tier of schools worldwide and top 44% of UK Independent Schools. At GCSE level, the three-year rolling average of A*-A is 63%.
The school's admissions policy is broadly non-selective. Priority for admissions is given to students of the founding trustee nations – British, Australian, New Zealand, and Irish students. These nationalities make up slightly under half of the student population. The school has around one-third Malaysians and 49 other nationalities represented.
The Alice Smith School started in 1946 as a stop-gap home school in Kuala Lumpur. At that stage, the expatriate schools in the cooler highlands that had been operating in Malaya before the Second World War had not yet re-opened. In 1975, Patricia Lee, former headmistress of the school from 1964 to 1989, described the motivation behind the school's inception:
People's ideas about living in the tropics began to change as the war had shown them that they had more resistance to the heat than they had imagined and they began to feel it was no longer imperative to send children back to temperate climates at a very early age. One person who held this view was Alice Fairfield Smith, whose husband Hugh was the Statistician at the Rubber Research Institute. In 1946, she decided to keep her daughter Lindsay with her and to teach the child herself. When three months later, there were enough children for two classes, Mrs. Smith realised that this was not going to be the temporary project she imagined, and the Eaton Road School was registered with the Department of Education.
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