Serena Patel

Serena is Co-Head of Education at Zaya Education, where she leads Al Fanar School and Zaya’s wider education portfolio alongside Karla Davis. Her work begins from a single conviction: that the outer world — the structures, the systems, the institutions people spend their lives inside — should be designed to serve the inner person. As co-founder of Zamani Learning she helped shape the holistic thinking behind Al Fanar School in Dubai, and she is co-architect of Najma, a school operating system built by educators to follow a child’s development across the whole of childhood rather than record their attainment year by year. Her attention now is on what comes next: how organisations are designed so that human-centred intentions survive scale, succession and regulation, and how the same thinking extends beyond the school gate. Less what an institution says it believes, more what its systems make possible on an ordinary Tuesday.