St. Samuel’s International Academy for Boys was established more than thirty years ago by the world famous pedagogue and humanitarian Professor Ben Dover whose interest in boys’ education and development stretched back many years.

From its very beginning, St Samuel’s had a dual focus.

On the one hand it was to offer a second chance to boys who had failed to make the most of their opportunities at high school level and who had, in consequence, failed to achieve the grades necessary to enroll at college. As a result, St Samuel’s only admits students of 18 years of age but we can assure parents that, if their sons stay with us for either our one year or two year courses, they will go on to achieve their goals.

Dr Dover’s philosophy was that only a major environmental change would offer such boys a final attempt at fulfilling their academic potential. Hence St Samuel’s offers a strict, disciplined and focused regime where nothing less than the highest academic effort and achievement is tolerated and where all the distractions of home and contemporary youth culture are removed. We are, indeed, extremely proud that the environment at St Samuel’s has frequently been described as strict.

We believe that many of our students’ previous difficulties have been caused by the fact that they have fallen victim to the pressure that contemporary society puts on young people to grow up too fast. As part of our work putting them back into mainstream education and hence back into society as a whole, we deliberately seek to recreate the strictly ordered, controlled and disciplined environment which they have chosen to reject or of which, at the very least, they have failed to take advantage of in the past.

Parents who send their sons to St Samuel’s are, we know, looking for the traditional boarding school atmosphere and ethos that we offer. Thus, for example, we deliberately outfit all our students in formal school uniform and insist unquestioningly and firmly on the highest standards of personal presentation and conduct.

We have ensured that there are absolutely no distractions to tempt the boys away from their proper academic and sporting activities. In particular, Professor Dover was adamant that female students were never to be admitted to St Samuel’s - a tradition we continue to adhere to strictly to this day.

Professor Dover’s studies of Ancient Greek culture, art and society made him a passionate advocate of the value of sport and physical education in developing boys into rounded and well developed young men. He therefore established at the outset that St Samuel’s was to offer pioneering educational programs and a wide range of sports scholarships to physically talented but underprivileged boys who would otherwise be unable to benefit from our ethos and our unrivalled facilities.

Scholarships are offered to boys with marked athletic abilities and who, in our judgment, have realistic chances of going on to professional careers in sport. They almost all come from poorer families in second or third world countries where their home life and socio-economic conditions would normally have prevented them from achieving their goals.

Orphans, boys from broken homes or families living with the scourge of chronic sickness, addiction or poverty, and boys rescued from unproductive, anti-social and often criminal lives on the streets have all benefited from Professor Dover’s revolutionary philosophy and our special courses have allowed many of them to go on to win sporting scholarships to universities and colleges all over the world.

Professor Dover also developed a groundbreaking Sponsorship scheme, allowing individual supporters to contribute to boys’ tuition and boarding expenses and the further development of the St Samuel’s network.

The St. Samuel’s network of academies currently operates in Riga, Latvia, and in Bogota, Colombia. While each branch imparts its own individual flavor and emphasis to our founder’s philosophy, both subscribe wholeheartedly to his guiding ethos as laid down in the motto by which all our teachers and pupils try to live: Pueris inoptibus manus utilis - a helping hand to boys in need.