VERSO is the world’s first international school to have its conceptual blueprint created by IDEO – the world’s leading design and innovation company. Using IDEO’s human-centered design process, a small team of international educators and designers from IDEO spent 16 weeks on the road at the end of 2015, visiting innovative schools across the US, Singapore, Hong Kong and Thailand. Using a highly disrupted world as its backdrop, the design team crafted a compelling case for reimagining and redesigning what an international school experience could be. Drawing on educational research, contemporary space design, and hours and hours of interviews with educators, school leaders, parents and students, the design team brought to life a vision for a new international school that would meet the needs of its learners as they navigated a rapidly changing and highly disrupted world. Challenging some of the traditional success metrics that we associate with an international school education, the design team embarked on a challenge to re-engineer a regular US curriculum model with an emphasis on student identity, connecting learning to the world outside school, and most importantly how to develop the skills and confidence to lead your own journey.

Having opened in August 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, VERSO is now in its third year of operations and despite the challenges it continues to face, this emerging, evolving and iterative school reveals what it looks and feels like at the cutting edge of educational innovation.