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Let Them Fly with Jenna Sheehan, Enhance Training Institute

How often do we see a child who seems switched off at school light up the moment they're doing something they actually love?

In this episode I sit down with Jenna Sheehan, Programme Manager at Enhance Training Institute, for a conversation that gently challenges where we think real learning happens. Jenna has spent twelve years as an educator and school leader here in the UAE, and we talk a lot about something every parent has felt but doesn't always trust: that a child's true potential shows up when they're genuinely interested, and that this is so often outside the classroom rather than in it.

We explore the work she leads at ETI, from M3, the Minds, Movers and Makers camp blending STEM, woodwork, creative arts and photography for younger ones, to Youth Founders, a ten-week journey where teenagers build a real business idea all the way to a Demo Day. Running through all of it is the same quiet belief: that character, resilience and courage matter every bit as much as grades, and that children rise when learning is built around their curiosity.

This one is for any parent who has watched their child come alive over the thing they love, and wondered how to give them more of it. A warm, hopeful conversation about the potential waiting just beyond the report card.

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We have all had a version of that evening. The homework is spread across the kitchen table, the tutor is booked, the revision timetable is colour coded and stuck to the fridge, and still something is not quite working. The child in front of us is tired, flat, a little switched off.

Amr Fahmi thinks we may be looking in the wrong place.

Amr is the founder of The Educated Coach, and in this episode he makes a case that is easy to forget in a region where so much of childhood happens indoors, in the car, or in front of a screen. Children need to move. Not as a reward for finishing their work. Not as the first thing to be cut when exams get close. Movement is one of the conditions that makes the learning possible in the first place.

We talk about:

• Why a child who moves regularly sleeps better, settles faster and holds their focus for longer
• What happens to a child's confidence and mood when movement disappears from their week
• The moment so many families face, when sport is dropped to "make room" for study, and what that decision really costs
• How to build movement into family life in the heat, in apartment living, and around a packed school timetable
• Why this matters just as much for the quiet child, the anxious child and the child who says they hate PE
• What Amr wishes every parent understood before the pressure years arrive

This one is for every parent who has stood at the door with car keys in hand, wondering whether to push their child out to training or let them stay at the desk a little longer.

If this episode speaks to you, please share it with a friend who needs to hear it, and follow Let Them Fly wherever you listen.

Guest: Amr Fahmi, Founder of The Educated Coach

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Every parent knows the feeling. It is 3am, you are sitting on the edge of a small bed, and you are already doing the maths on how you will get through the school run, the meetings and the whole of tomorrow.

In this episode of Let Them Fly, Heather Harries is joined by Anna Baker, founder of SleepBaker Consultancy and a baby and child sleep consultant with more than a decade of experience helping exhausted families find their way back to rest. Anna is a mum of two herself, and she talks about sleep the way parents actually live it, not the way the textbooks describe it.

We talk about why sleep is one of the most underrated factors in how a child performs at school, from concentration and memory to behaviour, resilience and how they manage friendships in the playground. Anna explains what is really happening when a child cannot settle, why the early years set the pattern for everything that follows, and how families here can protect sleep when late dinners, family gatherings, long commutes and a 6.30am school bus are all part of normal life.

In this episode:

• Why a tired child is so often mistaken for a difficult child, or a struggling one
• The link between sleep and school performance, and what teachers notice first
• Building strong sleep foundations in the baby and toddler years
• Naps, night waking and settling, and what to do when nothing seems to work
• Keeping routines consistent across parents, grandparents and helpers at home
• Small, realistic changes that make a difference within a week

Whether you have a newborn, a toddler who fights bedtime every single night, or a child whose teacher has mentioned they seem tired in class, there is something in this conversation for you.

Find Anna at SleepBaker Consultancy. Find more support for your family's education journey at heatherharries.com.

https://sleepbaker.ae/

https://www.heatherharries.com

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Starting Again: Mark Colbourne MBE on Resilience, Discipline and the Long Road

Most of us tell our children that hard work pays off. Mark Colbourne MBE is proof of what that actually looks like, and how long it can take.

Mark represented Wales at volleyball in his twenties. Then, in 2009, a paragliding accident left him with a broken back and a future he had not planned for. He was almost forty when he sat on a racing bike for the first time. Three years later he stood on the podium at the London 2012 Paralympic Games with a gold medal, a silver medal and a world record, and was awarded an MBE for services to cycling.

In this episode, Mark talks to us about what it really takes to begin again, and why the habits that carried him through were formed long before the medals. We talk about discipline, and how the small daily routines children build at school quietly become the ones they lean on as adults. We talk about the value of sport alongside education rather than in competition with it, and about what parents can helpfully say to a child who is not yet the fastest, the brightest or the most obviously gifted in the room.

For any parent watching their child work hard and wondering whether it is landing, this is a conversation worth an hour of your time.

Don't dream it. Know it. Do it.

https://www.heatherharries.com

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Every mother I speak to in this region carries the same quiet question. Not "will my child pass?" but "will my child be alright?"

We move countries for our children. We leave grandparents, and cousins, and the streets we grew up on, and we do it because we believe that somewhere out here is a school that will see our child properly. And then we arrive, and we are handed a list of ninety schools, a WhatsApp group full of opinions, and a deadline.

My guest this week has spent his whole career on the other side of that decision.

Dan Clark is the Founding Principal of Queen Elizabeth's School, Dubai Sports City, the first campus ever opened overseas by an English school with more than four hundred and fifty years of history behind it. Before Dubai, he taught in a comprehensive in Derby, spent a decade at Repton, and ten years at Marlborough College as Deputy Head. He was born in Edinburgh, educated in Scotland, and has now brought all of it to a plot of land in Dubai that opens its doors this month.

What I loved about this conversation is that he did not lead with league tables. He talked about character. About reading being the last real superpower in an age of artificial intelligence. About measuring a child from their own starting point rather than against the child sitting next to them. And about why, when you go and look at a school, you should ask to see an ordinary Tuesday.

If you are choosing a school this year, or quietly worrying that you chose the wrong one, stay with us.

This is Let Them Fly.

https://www.heatherharries.com

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There's a moment most mums here know well. You're standing at the gate at 6:50am, your child is climbing into a car, and a small voice at the back of your mind asks the question nobody wants to say out loud: do I actually know who is driving my child today?

In this episode I sit down with Lauren Hamilton, founder of Ride Skipper UAE — and a mum who asked that exact question and couldn't find an answer she was happy with.

Lauren didn't set out to build a company. She set out to get her own child from A to B safely. What she found instead was a system that wasn't built for families: drivers on commission-only gig contracts, cars without the right seats, and a different face at the wheel every week. So she built the alternative — a chauffeur service where vetted, salaried drivers take your child in your own family car, with the same familiar person doing the run each day.

We talk about:

• Why "who is driving?" is one of the biggest unspoken worries for families in the UAE
• What a proper vetting process actually looks like — and why Lauren believes trust can't be automated
• The difference a salaried, secure driver makes to how someone drives with your child in the back
• What families relocating to the Middle East should ask before they book any transport
• The hidden hours the school run takes from family life — and what parents do with that time when they get it back
• Lauren's honest account of building a business while raising a young family

This one is for every parent who has ever sat in traffic on Al Khail Road wondering how the day got away from them — and for anyone new to the region trying to work out how the school run really works here.

At Heather Harries Education Hub we've spent ten years walking alongside families across the region — from FS1 through to university applications, school selection for relocating families, careers guidance, SEN support and home schooling. The school run may not appear on a report card, but a calm, safe journey to school shapes how a child arrives at the classroom door. That's why this conversation matters.

Find Ride Skipper: [Instagram @rideskipperuae] | [https://www.rideskipper.com/]

If this episode helped, please follow the show and share it with a mum in your group chat who needs to hear it. It's how other families find us.

https://www.heatherharries.com

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Let Them Fly with Harry Allen, Minerva Virtual Academy

What if school could fit around your child, instead of your child having to fit around school?

In this episode I sit down with Harry Allen, Vice Principal for the Middle East at Minerva Virtual Academy, for a warm and honest conversation about online education and what it can offer families here in the Gulf. For so many of us raising children far from home, the question of "is this the right environment for my child?" never quite switches off. Harry has spent more than twenty years in international schools, and he speaks to that worry with real gentleness.

We explore what online schooling actually looks like day to day, how it supports children who don't always thrive in a busy classroom, and the quiet reassurance of one to one mentoring and a school that knows your child by name. We talk flexibility, wellbeing, and the children who flourish when learning is built around who they are.

This one is for any parent who has ever wondered whether there might be a different way. No pressure, no judgement. Just a calm conversation about giving our children room to grow, in whatever shape that takes.

For more information about MVA - log into their website https://www.minervavirtual.com/ae

https://www.heatherharries.com

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Let Them Fly — with Jan Horn, SAE University College Dubai

Somewhere in your home there is a child who draws instead of revising. Who edits videos at midnight. Who builds worlds in a game and knows every sound in a film. And somewhere in you, quietly, sits the question you don't quite say out loud: is that a career, or is it a hobby that will cost my child their future?

If you've ever felt that — and I promise you, almost every parent I meet in this region has — this episode is for you.

My guest today is Jan Horn, Managing Director of SAE University College here in Dubai, part of SAE, one of the world's specialists in creative media education, where young people train in film, animation, game development, audio and design. But Jan didn't start there. He began his life in education as a teacher, and then a principal, in South Africa — nearly three decades of standing in front of real children, in real classrooms, watching what happens to a child when their gift is taken seriously, and what happens when it isn't.

He is one of the clearest voices in the Middle East on what's being called the creative economy. And he says something many of us in education have been slow to admit: that we have leaned so hard into STEM that we've quietly pushed the arts to the edge of the room — and told a whole generation of creative children that their talent is a lovely extra, rather than a living.

So we talked about all of it. Whether a creative path is genuinely safe. What the jobs actually are, here, in this region, right now. What parents get wrong when they steer a child toward medicine or engineering out of love and fear. Whether it's ever too early — or too late — to take a child's creative side seriously. And the moment every parent dreads: when your child's happiness and your own hopes for them don't point in the same direction.

Twenty minutes. No judgement, whichever camp you're in.

Let's let them fly.

https://www.heatherharries.com