How can we Measure Holistic Education? Aiglon and an Emerging Global Movement

The challenge of measuring holistic education, particularly aspects such as character formation and spiritual development, is shared by many schools. These are hard to put a number on, and yet they are core to what most of us would call a genuinely good, human-centred education. Hard to measure doesn’t mean impossible to track. But it does mean moving past proxies like programme participation or standard academic metrics, neither of which actually captures whether character has strengthened, empathy has deepened, interpersonal skills have grown, or inner development has taken place. What is needed instead is a mix of different tools, often qualitative, that can hold the complexity of holistic development. Measuring growth in character is less like counting beans and more like capturing how a palette of colours has shifted: too complex to reduce to a number line.

Aiglon College is among a growing number of schools that take this challenge seriously. 

Over the past three years, the school has been actively exploring ways to track holistic learning outcomes. I was struck, back in 2021, by how honest the school’s leadership team was in its own self-review. Rather than adopting a neat, one-size-fits-all definition of high-quality learning, Aiglon admitted that learning can not always be pinned down, and grounded its perspective instead in the words of its founder, John Corlette: “High-quality learning is for the learners of Aiglon, past and present, to become global citizens who develop a spirit of service to the community and to one another.”

This definition goes far beyond what can be captured in a gradebook. To put it into practice, Aiglon developed an in-house framework based on its five Guiding Principles for Learning (challenge, respect, responsibility, service, and diversity) alongside ten holistic learning descriptors. The model supports a richer form of reporting, but as Assistant Head Jack George once told me, its success depends as much on culture change as on technical design, especially among parents who still look for traditional indicators like  Grade Point Average (GPA) averages.The model works by continuous input from many student-facing Aiglon educators (not just teachers).

That reporting work has not stood still. Since I first spoke with Jack, it has grown into a fuller assessment model and, more recently, into something Aiglon calls Spirit review, both closely woven into the original holistic reporting approach. The reasoning, as Jack explains it: in a workplace increasingly shaped by AI, the competencies students will need, and an authentic sense of self, matter more than ever. Aiglon’s assessment and reporting models are evolving, in his words, to help students build their own narratives of self-discovery, an idea that echoes a quote Jack often returns to, from the educationalist Kurt Hahn: “There is more in us than we know if we could be made to see it; perhaps, for the rest of our lives we will be unwilling to settle for less.” Jack has written more on this shift, together with Matthew Savage, in Rethinking What We Illuminate in Student Reporting, and recently spoke about wider assessment practices at Edufest Le Rosey.

Aiglon is part of the Coalition to Honour All Learning, a network of over 80 schools worldwide that are pioneering new ways to recognise and assess holistic learning. Coalition members share a belief: there is no single way to identify competencies or build character, and each school should find what fits its own context. Some of the more promising tools and frameworks emerging from this network include:

• Portfolios
• Micro-credentialing systems
• Competency-based diplomas
• Mastery Transcripts
• Digital Badging
• The Learner Passport

Aiglon’s approach fits within this broader international movement. A few more examples from across the Coalition:

• Colombo Británico is piloting AI-supported assessment of Approaches to Learning (ATLs), aligned with school values. The catch: finding time for teachers to log qualitative observations.
• ISA and St. Katharine’s Morland School are developing emotional education assessment and global citizenship initiatives, including projects that build intercultural understanding.
• Amala Education for Refugees runs a project-based, competency-based learning programme for refugee youth, with a validated four-point proficiency scale. They’re tackling external recognition through a partnership with Melbourne Metrics.
• Citizens is a portfolio platform that uses AI to map student activities and benchmark global citizenship learning.
• Muzzy Lane and TIEP are two other competency-based education and assessment tools, alongside Mastery Transcript (the organisation behind the credentialing tool mentioned above).
• Ecolint’s Learner Passport, now being scaled through a partnership with ISA, is formative by design and includes mentor validation of student input.
• Melbourne Metrics and CIS have launched the New Metrics International School
• Programme, developing new assessment models for high school-to-university transition.

Each of these case studies reinforces a broader truth: measuring holistic education requires new language, new tools, and perhaps most importantly, new expectations. At Aiglon, the work is already underway, and if the pace of experimentation so far is any indication, there’s real momentum to keep pushing it forward.

Authored by Dr Raquel Scarpa Gebara, Chair - Safeguarding & Wellbeing Committee, Designated Safeguarding Governor, Aiglon College and Senior Manager in the Student Learning Design Department at the International Baccalaureate Organisation in The Hague