For his sixteenth birthday, Gez Hayden’s parents gave him the UK passport he had been longing for. That is where it began. After graduating in Modern Languages and two years working various jobs in France, he settled back in the UK and discovered the joy of teaching as a Department Head in the Midlands, though the itch to see the world never quite went away. He would spend the next three decades in international education across three continents before joining Search Associates in 2009.
A phone call from Africa started that career. He joined the International School of South Africa in 1990 as a founding staff member and Head of Sixth Form, and the family thrived there, in a world very different from Europe. In 1995, a first senior leadership role took them to the Khao Yai region of northeastern Thailand, where Gez helped establish a second start-up school, Universal IS, as Vice Principal. Two school launches and an M.Ed. in educational leadership later, he was ready to lead his own, and an offer that came out of a Search Associates fair in Oxford made him Director of the fledgling Nanjing International School in China.
NIS opened for the 1997 school year with forty students in five rented classrooms in a defunct hotel’s outbuildings. Three of those students were his own sons. Over twelve years Gez led the school to become China’s first three programme IB Continuum school, oversaw construction of a purpose-built campus in 2004, earned its first CIS and NEASC accreditation, and grew enrollment to 550. He has since conducted authorization and accreditation visits across China, Japan, and Australia for the IB, CIS, and NEASC, and as a founding board member of ACAMIS in 1998, built out its professional development programme across the China school network.
Today Gez works with the educators registered with his office. Having hired for his own schools, and having once been the teacher applying from a UK classroom with no idea what came next, he knows both what schools are looking for and what the search asks of the person going through it.
He and his wife, Amelia Ren-Hayden, divide their year between homes in Cape Town, South Africa, and Nanjing, China.
