Green Schools / Green School Bali / High School

High School

Learning With the World

Our High School is a four-year curriculum where young people learn with the world, and where what they do matters now.
At Green School Bali, academics and capacities are not ends in themselves: through learning and doing, they become the means to contribute to community. This is how Green School students grow into adaptable, purpose-driven advocates, the very capacities universities and employers increasingly value, and the foundation for whatever is calling: higher education, entrepreneurship, the arts, or any path that asks them to lead.

Green School Bali is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), a globally recognised assurance that, for learners who choose it, the pathway to higher education is open and well supported.

Learners choose from a wide range of courses and experiences, weaving academic depth with meaningful action. Whether diving into rigorous math and science, exploring literature and philosophy, or designing regenerative projects that emerge from local needs, learners forge their own pathways, guided by advisors who recognise that growth comes through autonomy, challenge, and relevance.

Ours is a High School where learners are challenged to reach personal excellence through contribution: to communities, to the living world, to regenerative futures. Each young person co-creates learning experiences throughout the day and across their high school years, so that deep learning and positive impact happen together, not in sequence.

We believe education should honour the individuality of each learner while nurturing the confidence and care to navigate complexity. That’s why our High School combines strong academic foundations with the freedom to pursue passions through capstones and interdisciplinary projects. Whether a learner is drawn to climate resilience, entrepreneurship, creative expression, or responding to biodiversity loss, we make space for those interests to take form, and to make a difference in the living world.

In the High School, young people are co-creators of our learning community. The Green School Student Association (GSSA) is a full class, within which students create and implement policies from curriculum to school life: GSSA is part of our governance as we live into intergenerational collaboration. Learners regularly suggest ideas for classes and are part of the co-design process. They also have the possibility of going off timetable to pursue a meaningful project that contributes to community and has clear learning outcomes.

"We believe young people should co-create both their present and their futures. When learning is deepened through action meaningful to the learner and to the community, we begin to meet our responsibilities to current and future generations. This is how we transform education: not through curriculum add-ons or bells and whistles, but through a commitment to regenerative practices that create the conditions conducive to life."
Dr. Benjamin Freud – Head of Campus

The Green Literacies in High School

The Green Literacies are our curriculum, the framework that shapes what our learners learn and how. Like an artist’s palette, they offer a spectrum of choice from which our educators craft themes, units, and explorations. Rather than teaching subjects in isolation, we blend knowledge domains as we design each learning experience, so that ideas connect across disciplines and understanding grows richer and stays with learners. The framework carries from Early Childhood through to High School, giving every learner breadth, depth, and consistency.

High School Courses

Every term, students select their courses from a broad and evolving range, across our Green Literacies. These ensure that we blend what are traditionally calls the sciences and mathematics as well as the humanities, the arts, and social studies. This freedom to choose is real, but it isn’t unstructured: to graduate, each learner accumulates 108 credits across all of the Green Literacies, so that however personal a student’s path, it moves through the full breadth of the curriculum. The result is the best of both: genuine ownership over what and how they learn, and the richness of a journey that travels the whole palette.

Biomimicry for Regenerative Design (BiRD)

Green School Bali’s mission is to grow a community of learners with the confidence and ability to bring regenerative organisations and communities to life, connected by shared core beliefs in the power of regenerative, impactful learning experiences.

In 2026, Green School Bali inaugurated the world’s first K–12 Biomimicry for Regenerative Design (BiRD) Lab. This is a space for learners to engage in living systems thinking, find inspiration in Nature to design local solutions to global challenges, and inspire the world with artefacts and stories of learning. But BiRD is more than a lab: it is an approach to learning and doing that nurtures regenerative futures through the cultivation of bio-empathy, reciprocity, and long-term thinking.

BiRD helps learners and educators of all ages uncover new ways of thinking, designing, and bringing to life the products, processes, and places needed for a collective shift to regenerative futures.

The core of BiRD’s contribution to transformational design is a learning journey based on four lenses: Sensing, Seeking, Shaping, and Storytelling.

Sensing: We notice what the living world shows and hides
Seeking: We ask big questions to understand and respond
Shaping: We create with the living world to help life flourish
Storytelling: We share what happens so connection can grow

Our Learning in Action

Connection With the Living World

Relationship with the living world is fundamental to the Green School experience and runs through all our Green School Skills. Our thematic learning enables students to Think in Systems and recognise the connection between social and ecological justice, supporting them to understand their voice, power, and role in creating change. This learning is threaded through courses and projects and is lived day to day, in where we learn, how we learn, and what we consume. This awareness shapes regenerative mindsets as a springboard for activism, for real projects that make a real difference, and for nurturing leadership in young adults. Underpinning it all is a strong foundation of scientific learning and the Green School Values. From climate change to marine ecology, from the circular economy to botany, our environmental science courses are flagship offerings delivered by educators with deep expertise, a deep commitment to the living world, and a values-based approach to life as our guide.

Thinking in Systems

Life cannot be compartmentalised into separate boxes, so why should learning be? Our curriculum takes an interdisciplinary approach to the way we learn. For students, this could mean learning mathematics and physics by building a bamboo bridge over a river that passes through our campus. Or learning biology by exploring marine biodiversity, understanding our part in it, and working towards its conservation and regeneration.

Each student learns differently, and our learning blocks are designed to foster a deep love for learning. We have seen students thrive when programmes value their individual passions and empower them to lead their own learning journeys. This video is one example of our approach to learning.

Greenstone

Greenstone is the culmination of a Green School education: a two-year project in which each student takes on something that matters to them and to the community, human and other-than-human. Through this genuine contribution, craft, commitments, and contribution to community come together, and where the capacities a student has grown become means rather than ends.

The work develops over two years through ongoing touchpoints with the community it serves, so that a Greenstone is shaped by real relationships and real purpose rather than in isolation. Along the way, each project moves through a confirmation process: a panel of three specialists reviews the work to ensure depth, critical thinking, and coherence. A Greenstone is something earned.

The TED-style talk in front of several hundred people closes as celebration. The talk is the moment; the contribution is the point. These presentations are a rite of passage for every Green School graduate, when the community gathers to honour two years of work and they send students on ready to adapt, to advocate, and to do meaningful things for others.

Find out what makes a Greenstone.

Click here to watch some inspiring student Greenstones.

Jalan Jalan

These experiential programmes are curated with service, environmental, and social impact at the centre. Students explore their passions and build strong connections with causes they feel deeply about. Courses are designed to foster the Green School Skills, with particular emphasis on adaptability, leadership, awareness, collaboration, and creative thinking.

For instance, the course Coral Restoration & Reef Ecology moves beyond recreational diving into the practice of coral propagation and reef maintenance. Students use science-backed techniques to plant and maintain coral, contributing directly to the reef structures that divers and snorkelers rely on.
The program includes transect studies, biodiversity surveys, and species identification of coral and fish, along with training in mortality-rate assessment to track and report on the health and development of the reef ecosystem.

Diving takes place most weeks, weather permitting, giving students direct experience of a reef’s increasing biodiversity over time. One week each term is spent working alongside the research team in the field station, learning identification techniques and contributing to the planning of ongoing restoration work.

Social Emotional Wellbeing

We believe that a child’s wellbeing is as important as their academic success. At Green School, we seek to nurture within our students confidence, kindness, empathy and a joy for learning. We embrace the idea that sustainability starts from within and understanding ourselves as individuals – what we believe in, how we manage set-backs and how we find joy in all that we do – is a critical building block. Building on this are our relationships with others and our relationship with our incredible planet.

Students learn best when they are engaged, mindful and active. Our wellbeing programme (physical, social and emotional, mindfulness, and relationship education) skills students up as stewards of their own health and wellbeing and reflects our holistic approach to education. This is imperative if we are to nurture changemakers who will become the guardians of our planet.

Green School Pathways

At Green School Bali, we celebrate the diversity of student journeys after graduation. Our students are known for forging unique, meaningful, and purpose-driven pathways, whether continuing on to higher education, starting their own ventures, taking a gap year, or diving into social or environmental impact work.

Approximately 65% of our graduates continue on to university, and our alumni network now includes over 250 students who have enrolled at more than 85 universities across 40+ countries. In 2025, our graduating class of 26 students received over 200 university offers — our highest number ever — a testament to the strength and success of our Pathways program.

We support these transitions with a dedicated Pathways Counsellor, who works closely with each student and their family to design a personalised post-Green School plan. Whether it’s choosing the right university, exploring gap year options, or mapping out a path in entrepreneurship, we walk alongside learners as they take confident steps toward their future.

Our Alumni

By the time they venture out of our wall-less campus, our Alumni have acquired skills, knowledge and an understanding of themselves and the world to step forward with confidence. Through REAL and relevant learning, our Alumni experienced the power of making a difference, before graduation, setting them up for rewarding post-graduation pathways.

Whether it is straight to university, a year of life learning through volunteering or internships, or starting their own enterprise or foundation, our young but growing Alumni are shaping the world in remarkable ways. They are making change, leading change, finding purpose in what they do, following their hearts and minds, and accessing some of the world’s most rapidly growing and needed career paths.

Cial

Class of 2023

Cial, Class of 2023, is currently continuing his academic journey in Madrid, Spain. His experience at Green School Bali was instrumental in shaping his open-minded worldview and preparing him with the values, skills, and confidence to thrive as a well-rounded global citizen.

Freddie

Class of 2023

Freddie, Class of 2023, is the founder of an eco-startup that empowers companies to measure and reduce their carbon footprint. This venture grew out of his Greenstone project in his final year at Green School Bali, reflecting his strong commitment to environmental stewardship and entrepreneurial innovation.

Tirta

Class of 2023

Tirta, Class of 2023, is a passionate and driven Green School Bali alumna whose journey reflects the power of personal growth through purposeful education. Known for her dedication, resilience, and commitment to learning, Tirta has earned a scholarship to Centre College in Kentucky, USA. Her story is a testament to the global opportunities that open up for Green School graduates and the meaningful impact they continue to make around the world.

Other Alumni

Clover Hogan

Class of 2016

Clover H. alumni Green School Bali is a green changemaker, climate activist, researcher on turning anxiety into agency, and founder of Force of Nature; she is mobilizing the emerging generation of leaders, in the face of the climate crisis. She has worked alongside the world’s leading authorities on sustainability, within the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies, and inside classrooms across the UK.

Maxwell Hidajat

Class of 2017

Upon graduating from Green School Bali, Maxwell was accepted to the prestigious Cornell University, ranked among the best universities in the world. Following the completion of his degree Maxwell joined the Social Enterprise Group at Cornell, where he is a Project Manager. In the future, he hopes to return to Indonesia to tackle his country’s pressing socioeconomic and environmental issues.

Melati Wijsen and Isabel Wijsen

Class of 2019 and 2020

Sisters Melati (17) and Isabel (15) Wijsen VALEDICTORIAN were just 10 and 12 years old in 2013 when they started Bye Bye Plastic Bags. They remember being inspired by a lesson in school about people who changed the course of history and asking themselves ‘What can we do as children living in Bali, NOW, to make a difference?’. The answer was-Bye Bye Plastic Bags a campaign to end the use of single-use plastic bags in Bali, which has grown into an internationally recognized movement for sustainability and youth empowerment.

Click here to read more stories on how our changemakers are shaping the world with their ideas, actions and successes.