How ECLARO Built a School That Turns Education into Legacy
It’s all in motion before the morning traffic thins. By seven o’clock in Quezon City, the corridors outside ECLARO Academy classrooms are already dense with uniforms and the low, rising murmur of three languages—English, Filipino, and the quick shorthand of kids trading study tips, chismis and ever-reforming theories about their world. In one room, a literature class is working its way through the last paragraph of a story, while next door a science teacher holds a beaker up to the light and lets the silence stretch until a student hazards a hypothesis. Down the hall, beneath a banner that reads “Learn Today. Lead Tomorrow.,” a bulletin board is crowded with essays, sketches, notes, photos, all layered over one another like a record of successive drafts of a life.
The place has the almost-untamed, kinetic energy of a school that takes its accreditation seriously and its students’ futures even more so, an institution organized around the idea that the real work is not creating student mindsets focused only on futures with careers, but teaching them how to remain curious long after the bell rings and become lifelong learners.
ECLARO Academy is a natural extension of a partnership with the Philippines that began in 2004, when the talent solutions firm ECLARO first started helping clients build teams in Metro Manila. By 2009, ECLARO had based its global delivery business here, recruiting and managing Filipino professionals for roles with clients around the world, from software engineers to finance, operations, and customer-experience teams. Forty-plus clients and nearly 1,000 employees later, that business continues to be driven by the belief that the Right People are the Answer.
People have always been at the heart of every ECLARO iteration. From the start, the company vision was to be collaborative, consultative, and deliver custom solutions driven by each client’s specific challenges, each candidate’s unique skills and career goals. ECLARO consistently found world-class talent that could make an impact for its clients, yes, but also for itself. Over the years, Filipino recruiters, HR practitioners, finance specialists, marketers, facilities managers, IT staff, and compliance officers have helped build, scale and run that engine on the ground.
And as ECLARO Co-Founders Paul and Tom Sheridan spent more and more time in the country, they became acutely aware not only of challenges and solutions within the job market, but within the families and communities all around them. At the forefront, they believed, and at the foundation, was education.
“We’ve always been driven by a long-standing belief in the life-changing power of education,” Paul Sheridan says. “When we looked at the educational opportunities, or lack thereof, for millions of children, we determined that was an area where ECLARO could make a real difference. We saw a way to help underserved children in the Philippines gain access to the kind of schooling that could widen their horizons and literally change their lives, and it became a passion and a purpose.”
In 2013, the company opened the doors of the not-for-profit ECLARO Academy with scholarships for 18 technical-vocational scholars. But the trajectories of those first scholars suggested a broader possibility. Over the next decade, the school expanded into a full-fledged academic institution that now spans two campuses and pre-school, grade school, high school, a school for the deaf, and college programs in fields such as Computer Science, Communications, and Criminology.
More than 16,000 students have passed through ECLARO Academy, more than 4,000 have graduated, and over 4,600 are enrolled this year across two campuses in Metro Manila. ECLARO has provided some $7 million in scholarships for students from surrounding communities and for the families of its own employees, making sure the doors of always remain open, and that the opportunities continue to grow.
The school’s physical footprint is still being expanded to match that ambition. In March 2026, a groundbreaking in Quezon City set the stage for another campus and state-of-the-art facilities, which will begin welcoming students for the 2027-2028 school year.
“This world-class facility is a promise kept to our students,” said Dr. Allan Susarno, President of ECLARO Academy. “Since our school opened, we have dedicated ourselves to growth, improvement and creating opportunities where learners will have access to elite resources in and out of the classroom. This campus will truly embody the ‘Learn Today, Lead Tomorrow’ mindset that has driven the ECLARO Academy vision since we started.”
On the same day, Susarno called the expansion “another step in proving that education can change the course of a life, not just for one graduate, but for every younger brother, sister, and neighbor who comes after.”
The locations and curriculum and student body may evolve over time, but one constant through it all is the Shield. You’ll see it on school signs and report cards, school uniforms and athletic uniforms alike, and its symbols are squarely rooted in educational ambition. The shield itself stands for education as protection against the most persistent forms of scarcity—ignorance and poverty. The key on the left denotes the world of ideas and opportunity that opens when curiosity is unlocked. The book on the right embodies the lifelong pursuit of truth and knowledge.
Around it runs a compact Latin argument about what learning should drive: Ethicis, Virtus, Eruditus. “Ethicis” invokes the obligation to use knowledge for the common good; “Virtus” stands for the disciplined mastery of skills; “Eruditus” gestures toward enlightenment achieved over years of study and self-scrutiny. It is, in shorthand, the school’s claim that grades and diplomas alone are a thin measure of what it owes its students.
President Susarno likes to describe graduation day as “a journey—an end and a new beginning of a milestone.” In a recent address, he framed the academy’s ambition in language that could double as a mission statement: “The Academy’s goal of producing change agents who can succeed in a variety of professional settings while upholding strong ethical principles is embodied by its graduates.”
Those graduates are not, in his telling, simply job-ready. “We have been successful in producing students who are not just prepared for the workforce but also capable of being flexible, creative leaders in a world that is changing quickly.”
The mechanics of that preparation are both prosaic and quietly radical. The academy’s curriculum satisfies national requirements, but it is also shaped by a running conversation with ECLARO’s Philippine operation. Recruiters report the gaps they see in interviews, HR and operations managers describe the habits that distinguish employees who thrive in global roles. Corporate leaders in finance, facilities and marketing share insights and knowledge that has driven ECLARO to become one of the world’s leaders in talent solutions.
The school motto “Learn Today. Lead Tomorrow.” is no mere ornament. In practice, it has become a prompt to ask what leadership will require of students who come of age in a labor market defined by volatility and distance. The academy’s answer extends beyond coding bootcamps or conversational English.
“Through leadership programs, value formulation and recurring student consultations, ECLARO Academy emphasizes the development of character, work ethics and a growth-focused mentality,” Susarno notes. Faculty draft proposals for partnerships with industries and NGOs “to synchronize [the school’s] programs with the present demands of the job market, making students competitive and versatile professionals after graduation.”
If this sounds like a snug fit between schooling and employment, that is by design. ECLARO’s business depends on connecting worldwide companies with Filipino professionals who can step into complex roles quickly—across development, finance, customer experience, analytics and IT support—and on helping those teams succeed over years, not quarters. The academy sits upstream of this work, not as a captive pipeline but as a long-horizon investment in the kind of education that makes such careers possible in the first place: rigorous, broad, anchored in values as much as in technical skill.
In addition to the scholarships and supporting the school’s infrastructure, ECLARO also recruits from the graduating classes for both internal roles and positions with clients. It additionally encourages clients to get involved, to sponsor underprivileged students, visit the school, help change lives. The model has been recognized for numerous honors, including the Outsourcing Impact Award for Education from Outsource Accelerator, and the Global Impact Sourcing Award from the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) and the Rockefeller Foundation.
No one inside ECLARO or the Academy mistakes this for a comprehensive answer to the country’s educational deficits. A single institution cannot absorb the weight of millions of out-of-school youth or shield graduates from the volatility of industries that can reroute work with a memo. Yet that is precisely why companies whose business depends on Filipino talent cannot treat schooling as a distant concern, the Sheridans have argued, and why the link between education now and success later must be strengthened.
“We are committed to providing a way to help those in need truly build a more positive future for themselves,” says Tom Sheridan. “We strive to help the future workforce starting in kindergarten, to give them the tools to use education to impact their earnings and economic opportunity down the line. The first step on the career ladder, that first stride toward skills development and economic self-sufficiency, can be that first step a child takes in their education.”
The work, the interconnectedness, shows up in small, almost invisible increments: a teacher staying late over a scholarship essay, an IT technician reopening a lab on a Saturday, a recruiter rehearsing a first job interview with a nervous graduate. By the time a student leaves campus for the last time, that ECLARO Academy shield is no longer just symbol. It is something every one of them has, piece by piece, learned to carry on their own.
ECLARO Co-Founders Paul and Tom Sheridan.
