ALTS Education was established in 2010 with the sole purpose of assisting the Nigerian students who want to study abroad find the right school and the right course of study. It is important that Nigerians get real value for the investment they are making on education and the children/students do not end up in ‘mushroom’ schools.
As a Nigerian organization who has the interest of Nigerians at heart, ALTS do not take lightly the responsibility bestowed on us, we take every word in our motto seriously – ‘Investing in our children and the future of Nigeria through International and Global Education’ – ALTS.
ALTS Education was founded and managed by myself (Mrs. Anthonia Foluke Sawyerr), a product of a catholic girls boarding school in Nigeria. I did my A Levels at the Federal School of Arts and Science, followed by a Bachelors in English Language from the Lagos State University, prior to relocating to the UK, where I did my Masters, raised three children, lived and worked for over two decades.
The idea of the ALTS initiative stemmed from my own personal experience of raising my three children in the UK; where I had to carefully navigate the educational system with very little understanding prior to that. Yes, there is a system there and you must understand the rules of the game. The catchment areas, the 11 plus exams, the grammar school option, the church schools, selective vs non-selective, the independent and public school options etc. Above all, your post code matters! Your neighbourhood counts for a lot. The only thing that worked for me was my passion, my curiousity, my relentless ability to research about the system and the sheer interest I have in education, coupled with my husband’s input, who had attended a UK boarding school from the age of 12 – all of these came together and provided me with the robust understanding I needed.
All of my research and hard work paid off. Although my children had attended a paid Montessori nursery, we were able to get them into an excellent Church of England Primary school in Belgravia where we paid nothing. Whilst this sounds pretty straightforward, our postcode and being a member of the church of England in the parish made it possible. Transitioning to secondary school came with its own anxieties and challenges for year 6 students. I was of course armed and loaded with information on the process. Word went round the school that you should be speaking to ‘Abi’s mum…’ (myself) ‘as she can assist’ and that is exactly how it all began. Basically, informally assisting other parents at my children’s primary school in the UK. The primary school years were followed by time at grammar schools and independent schools, after which the three progressed to university and college to study Medicine, Law and French and Piloting respectively.
Knowing the amount of work I had put into understanding the system and identifying the right schools for my children and seeing how little others knew as I engaged other parents about the options they were considering, it then dawned on me that the parents from overseas must find it challenging to select or identify the most suitable school for their children. This is the point I spotted a gap and an opportunity to assist fellow Nigerians who might find my knowledge useful as I had started coming across a decent number of Nigerian students coming out to boarding schools in the UK.
Not only did we have a thorough and full experience of the UK education and system, the opportunity to live and work as expatriates in Dubai for a brief period gave my children and I the perspective of schooling abroad when they attended Repton Dubai.
As a Business Consultant in Advisory Services with KPMG, I am a trained consultant with transferable skills. I left the world of business consulting in 2010, when we moved from Dubai to Nigeria and followed my passion to move to education consulting. In 2010, ALTS Education was born.
Being in Nigeria with my children in school here attending Grange school and Greensprings school, was perfect. I was not only a ‘Study Abroad Education Consultant’, I also had the opportunity to be a mum at some of the schools many of our prospective students come from.
At ALTS Education, we provide a wide range of bespoke services to our clients.
We keep abreast of the ever-changing requirements, curriculum and policies and are able to provide holistic advice to both parents and students. Our expert consultants cover all stages of education from prep school level to post-graduate level, career counseling and much more.
It is important that the schools come out to Nigeria to meet directly with the students on their home soil. We run a boarding school fair every year where we invite boarding schools from the UK, USA, Canada and Switzerland to visit Nigeria and meet directly with the students and parents. We want to ensure that Nigerian parents who choose to send their children abroad are making the right and informed choices. Our Boarding School Fair for 2023 is scheduled to take place in October; see below schedule. We will have 35 schools from the UK, Canada, USA and Switzerland in attendance. It is important that we do a mixed fair and have all the countries Nigerians like to go and study represented in order to provide parents and students with options.
The visiting schools are a mix of highly competitive and mixed ability schools, co-ed and single gender schools. They offer a wide range of activities and extra-curriculum. The schools have been carefully selected.
I will stress again that, we do not take the responsibility bestowed on us lightly when it comes to finding the right school for our students. A school can either make a child or break a child! We do not do this blindly and we do not do ‘cut and paste’. A big part of what ALTS Education does is visit schools, inspect their academic and boarding facilities, ensuring they are fit for purpose.
ALTS BOARDING SCHOOL FAIR 2023
35 BOARDING SCHOOLS VISITIN FROM THE UK, USA, CANADA & SWITZERLAND
SATURDAY 14th OCT . 10.30AM – 6PM
LOCATION: RADISSON Blu Anchorage – Ozumba Mbaddiwe Avenue, Victoria Island, Lagos
SUNDAY 15th OCT . 10.30AM – 3.30PM
LOCATION: RADISSON – (formerly Protea) Isaac John, GRA, Ikeja
In addition to boarding school placement, we also assist students with undergraduate and postgraduate admission and help with their study permit application. We provide an end to end service.
Mrs. Anthonia Foluke Sawyerr
Managing Partner
ALTS Education
Location: Victoria Island, Lagos
Email: schools@altsconsulting.com
Tel.+234802 973 0700, +234 818 000 0500. | IG: altseducation | Website: https://altsconsulting.com/
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