Activity

Physical exercise and physical challenge. Some examples are climbing, kayaking, running groups, basketball, and orienteering, with many more available.

Service

An unpaid and voluntary exchange that has a learning benefit for the student and the school’s local community. 

These range greatly, but some examples from our colleges and schools include supporting a local kinder-garden, running activities in refugee camps, engaging in sport and theatre activities with people with disabilities, science dissemination for children and adults, offering English conversation classes to the local community, working with an organic campus farm, offering multicultural experiences to students of local primary schools.

CAS demonstrates that a UWC education is not simply a series of academic challenges, but an approach for life: developing concern and compassion for others. CAS allows students to put their learning from inside the classroom into context. By making CAS a core part of the UWC experience, students develop their interpersonal skills through experiential learning, go on a journey of self-discovery by overcoming personal challenges, and provides an important balance to academic pressures.

Today, CAS is one of the three essential elements that every student must complete as part of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program, which is the curriculum that all UWC schools and colleges have adopted for the last two years of high school. Where other IB schools demand only the minimum requirements, UWC has taken the lead in this area and our schools and colleges conduct more CAS in one term than other schools do in the whole year - and many UWC students see their CAS activities as their most essential UWC experience.