Creativity, Activity & Service

“Life belongs to the living and he who lives must be prepared for change.” Goethe

The purpose of CAS is personal development beyond the classroom. In an IB Diploma school the focus is not just on academic success; it’s about ensuring students are developing skills that will enable them to be global citizens of the world, with an appreciation of the need to care about local, national and international issues.

At Haileybury Astana we put emphasis on pupils completing meaningful experiences, which cover the three CAS strands:


Activity involves physical experiences and is usually a sport such as hockey, squash, football, tennis or athletics. These activities should be focused on achieving a personal goal.

Service activities might be helping the elderly, helping out at the local soup kitchen, working with children with learning disabilities, hospital visits, environmental work or supporting local, national or international charities.

There is not a minimum number of hours you should spend doing CAS experiences. Instead, the focus is on these experiences being meaningful and ensuring the programme is continual for an 18 month period. To ensure experiences are meaningful pupils will spend time at the beginning of the programme ensuring they consider in depth what they want to get out of the CAS programme and how they can work towards making a difference in society.

The CAS Project is an opportunity for pupils to collaborate with other students to work on an experience, which runs for a minimum of 30 days. The current Year 12s worked in groups to run a social event at a home for the elderly just outside of Astana. This involved extensive planning, including a visit to the home to complete a risk assessment and identify rooms that could be used for the event. The event itself was an opportunity for our pupils to spend time with a vulnerable group of people they might not usually have the opportunity to communicate with. Pupils found the project to be a thoroughly rewarding and emotional experience, giving them a deeper understanding of the vulnerability of this group of people. One of the Year 12 students, Aidana stated following the event ‘hearing the residents talk about their lives and some of the struggles they’ve had made me realise that my own problems are trivial in comparison’.


Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy