Our People

Aybulat started his career in education as a Computer Science Teacher and a Deputy Head for ICT in a highly-selective boarding school for gifted and talented. Under his leadership ICT department grew from a small room and a couple of classrooms to become one of the biggest and most influential departments in the school.

As the next step of his professional development, Aybulat got his Master’s degree in Educational Leadership and Innovation from the University of Warwick (UK) in 2011, focusing his dissertation om the Impact of ICT Implementation.

Following that, Aybulat became one of the founding managers of Cambridge International School in St. Petersburg, which became very popular with expatriate families, where he later on held the positions of a Deputy-Principal and a Headteacher, working with international teachers from all over the world: the UK, Ireland, Canada, the US, etc.

Aybulat’s next professional endeavour was a role of a project manager for UniSchool International School Project, where he led a team which developed a new educational concept, worked with some world-renowned architectural bureaus on school premises designs (e.g. Rosan Bosch), scoured school buildings’ property market, worked on branding and developed a realistic financial model for school launch and operation.

Later Aybulat was offered a role of Co-Head at Innopolis International School, where has was tasked with launching a Primary Division, managing a team 20+ teachers and educators, located in a 45,000 sq ft brand-new campus, which quickly grew from 30 to 200+ students in less than 6 months.

In 2017, Aybulat returned to University of Warwick to pursue his passion for science and started as a Doctoral Researcher in Education. His main research interest was Values-based Education (VBE) – a pioneering pedagogical approach which places universal positive human values such as kindness, honesty, respect, care, courage, etc. at the heart of education. This approach is currently proudly used by several hundred schools in the UK and hundreds of schools worldwide in countries ranging from Sweden to India. Aybulat was warmly received by the UK’s values-based education community and soon became a VBE International Associate and was later promoted to VBE International Advisor in recognition of his work of researching and promoting VBE to the schools worldwide.

In 2018 Aybulat joined Warwick Projects Educational Consultancy as a Consultant, soon becoming a Senior Consultant, and eventually taking on the role of the Managing Partner. Leading a diverse team of educational experts, Aybulat focuses more on the business side of educational projects, such as strategy development, evaluating business viability of the concept and financial planning, but his main strength lies with supporting new school projects and educational start-ups where his divergent thinking and the ability to tie things together and build a comprehensive business model helps his clients get a fresh outlook and a framework to work with.

Aybulat is very comfortable with ambiguity which often accompanies new school launches, development of effective educational concepts, whole-school transformations, or VBE implementations. This comfort with ambiguity allows him to work productively even when starting from a blank slate — gradually shaping vague ideas into clear, thoughtful, and workable solutions that others can understand and act on.

The exposure to the concept of values-based education during his PhD years had a profound effect on Aybulat’s lifelong interest in education. He believes that values education should be widely used as a viable, proven and effective moral framework in modern education. He underlines the fact that while it is difficult to imagine a school without an Academic Framework, e.g. a National Curriculum, International Baccalaureate (IB) or Cambridge Curriculum, the vast majority of schools in the world do not have an explicit, well-defined and operational Moral Framework – such as values education, values-based education, or character education. Or even worse, some schools claim to have “values”, but they are for display only – on their website and their walls, without any meaningful implementation and internalization of values by students, staff and the wider school community.