LisaAnn started her teaching career in 1988 at Florida Park High School. In 1998, LisaAnn was appointed to St Peter’s College as a founder member of the school. In many ways this is where some of the creative ideas around the structure of Calibre Education started. In that critical first year, in a school of only 80 students and 6 staff, the College was afforded the luxury of flexibility in meeting the individual needs of students. LisaAnn was appointed as the Director of Staff and Students, which again allowed her to develop an understanding of the needs of individual students.
LisaAnn was appointed as Deputy to Christian Academy in 2004. This was a very small school with very small classes and was another ideal environment in which she could explore the concept of successfully meeting the academic and social needs of young people beyond the restrictions of traditional schooling.
LisaAnn has two sons – Dylan and Bradley. Dylan had always found mainstream school easy, but Bradley had contracted cerebellitus as a toddler, which meant that in his developmental years, he had been compromised, and as such, needed a more supportive academic environment. Bradley, while very strong in his verbal skills, found writing and the processing of written information very difficult. It was this experience with Bradley, in mainstream schools, that consolidated LisaAnn’s awareness of the importance of the needs of the individual child. This launched her on a quest to find new ways to educate young people, and so LisaAnn resigned from formal education and started Calibre Education (as CTG), after completing a course as a Life Coach. LisaAnn’s aim was to create a compassionate and relevant service that supported young people in mainstream schools, and developed programmes around their individual needs.
In 2007, LisaAnn was approached by a desperate parent about the possibility of her own son, Daniel, receiving a ‘homeschool’ education. LisaAnn agreed to look at a way of supporting a homeschool curriculum and the model of Calibre as an education center was born. By the end of 2007, 14 young people enrolled in the pioneering Calibre Centre. In 2007, the first 7 students wrote Matric as private candidates with Calibre Education as a Support Center.
Today, Calibre Education is a growing tribe of unique children united by a common goal in a system that remains faithful to LisaAnn’s original vision.
Adam Dobson started his teaching career at Woodmead School near Chartwell after graduating from Wits with a BA Ed in 1992. Woodmead was a school that had successfully taken on the restrictions imposed on private schools under Apartheid, and was recognised for its different approach to schooling.
Adam later joined St Peter’s College in 1999, and was instrumental in the development of the curriculum and academic programme in the founding years of the College. During this time he worked closely with LisaAnn in a range of groundbreaking and creative cross-curricular experiments.
The College, able to experiment with a clean canvass, was committed to new systems and identifying best practice for academic success. Everything, from the meaningful implementation of IT, to the physical functionality of the school buildings, was re-thought in the St Peter’s project and it was unafraid of breaking the traditional mould of private school education in South Africa.
Adam flourished in this environment and began to realize that well-managed programmes under-pinned by sensible strategic outcomes could change a child’s experience of any learning environment. As long as the teacher was committed, most challenges to learning could be neutralized.
Adam went on to be appointed as the Academic Deputy in charge of Academics at the College.
After a long detour, LisaAnn and Adam’s paths crossed again in 2008. Ignited by LisaAnn’s new vision at CTG, an old partnership was given new direction and by 2009 he had joined LisaAnn.
Together they have built a reputation as a formidable team that challenges and disrupts conventional thinking in education.