Harry Deelman

Harry Deelman has been part of the international school world since childhood, and brings more than 25 years of experience as a teacher and school leader to his role as a Senior Associate. He joined Search Associates in 1993, and has now spent more than three decades running one of Search’s regional offices full time, working alongside his wife, Margaret Deelman, who you can learn more about on our Meet the Team page.

Harry earned his B.A. and M.A. from Cambridge University and a Diploma of Education from Oxford, studying under Alec Peterson as he was helping shape the original IB Diploma Programme. Born into a South African family that had left the country to escape apartheid, Harry attended a grammar school in northern England before starting his career teaching Mathematics and Economics in Argentina and England. He then moved into school leadership, serving as Head of School in Buenos Aires, Rome, Dubai, and Bangkok, where he was the founding Head of NIST.

Beyond his own schools, Harry was elected by fellow school heads to serve on the leadership committees of several international school associations, including ESSARP, the River Plate schools’ group spanning Argentina and Uruguay, and as Vice-Chair of the Board of ECIS in the 1980s. He was also an overseas member of Britain’s HMC for thirteen years. As his career later moved into the Middle East and then East Asia, he took on similar roles with the regional school associations in each, extending decades of that same involvement across three continents. As a school leader, he was an early and consistent advocate for building more diverse teaching staffs, a priority he carried into every school he led. He has also been a regular presence at IB regional and worldwide conferences over the decades, and has visited more than 400 international schools worldwide in the course of his career.

Harry and Margaret are now based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where they run Search’s office together full time. Between them, they’ve built a deep, firsthand knowledge of schools across the regions they’ve worked, sharpened by years of joint school visits on behalf of Search. They raised their three children trilingually, in Spanish, English, and Italian, through international schools of their own, and several of their grandchildren are now having that same experience. That same firsthand experience, on both sides of the hiring table, in the classroom, and at the head of a school, is what he brings to every educator he works with today.