Profile
Hani Abul Khair helped found IQRA College while working as a research fellow in Adelaide. A senior research role at Petronas then took him overseas to Kuala Lumpur. In 2021, he returned to lead the school as executive principal. “I brought everything industry and research had taught me about building organisations that last.”
The college started out as the community needed a school that pursued academic excellence while staying true to its faith. “When we founded Iqra, there was no track record. Parents enrolled their children on faith in the people in front of them,” Abul Khair says. By the time he returned, some of those children were in senior school. A former classroom teacher, he had always intended to lead a school.
Abul Khair credits the college’s culture for its recent results. He points to IQRA’s median ATAR, which placed it among the top schools in South Australia in 2024 and 2025, and to a 2025 survey in which 93% of staff said they would recommend the college as a place to work.
“One strong year can be coincidental. Two in a row is a system working,” he says. “Good teachers stay where the culture is strong, and students do their best work with teachers who want to be there.”
Building that culture to outlast him is how Abul Khair thinks of his role. “I work on the school, not in it. My role is to build the leaders, systems and culture that solve problems without me, so I can focus on where IQRA needs to be in 10 years,” he explains. Four principals now lead the college’s sub-schools with real authority, and he mentors them while giving aspiring leaders responsibility early.
He says the discipline behind that approach came from his years in industry. “Many leaders can describe where they want an organisation to be. The hard work is breaking that into decisions, budgets, people and years of follow-through,” he says. He applies the same thinking to the launch of IQRA Online School, which he says will be the first online Islamic school in South Australia when it opens in Term 1 2027.
Abul Khair’s leadership draws on servant leadership, which he traces in his faith to the Prophet Muhammad. He walks the campus each morning, sits in on classes and meets every new staff member personally. “If I expect staff to go the extra mile for students, I have to go the extra mile for staff first,” he says.
Being named to The Educator’s Hot List for 2026 is something Abul Khair is grateful for, but he says the measure that matters is whether students leave IQRA as capable young people of good character.
For students, he expects the online school to matter most. “A family in regional South Australia, or anywhere a local Islamic school is out of reach, will be able to give their child an education that combines academic rigour with the values they want at home,” he adds.
5 Majors Road, O’Halloran Hill, Adelaide, SA 5158
08 8298 2550
admin@iqracollege.sa.edu.au
linkedin.com/in/hani-abul-khair-23a84617
iqracollege.sa.edu.au
Hani Abul Khair
Executive Principal IQRA College
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Bio
Milestones
1995–2009
2010–2015
2015–2019
2021–2026
Year–Year
Senior Teacher, Earth and Environmental Sciences at Al Ittihad Schools in Jordan
1995–2009
2010–2015: Research Fellow at the Australian School of Petroleum, University of Adelaide
2012: Co-founded IQRA College, South Australia
2010–2015
Senior Research Scientist at Petronas in Malaysia
2015–2019
School Principal, then Executive Principal, at IQRA College
2021–2026
Ongoing Professional Leadership Development — Actively participates in leadership development programs, continuously refining her practice to strengthen outcomes for staff and students.
Year–Year
Milestones
“I know this seems pretty simple, but [my philosophy] is always doing what’s right for clients and not what is best for me”
Collin Bruce,
Dominion Lending Centres
“I had to crawl my way out of debt and build up my mortgage business. I never forget that feeling, and I try to never take a new lead for granted. Every deal counts”
Collin Bruce,
Dominion Lending Centres
The professional philosophy that underpins all of it is strikingly basic – and Bruce knows it. “I know this seems pretty simple,” he says, “but always doing what’s right for clients and not what is best for me. I never have to worry about something coming back to me from a previous client.”
He has helped clients through years-long credit rehabilitation without earning a cent along the way. He has never placed a client in a product he wasn’t prepared to fully stand behind. The result is a practice built on trust generating its own momentum: repeat business and referrals that arrive without prompting, from clients who know the difference between a broker who serves them and one who services a transaction.
In Alberta, where Bruce has built a particularly strong market presence, his name is amplified by a heavy advertising campaign across television and radio – channels he values not simply for reach but for credibility. The ads, he notes, help legitimize him in a market where clients are choosing who to trust with some of the largest financial decisions of their lives. Alongside that visibility, he has cultivated deep relationships with builders and financial planners, creating a diversified pipeline of leads that insulates the business against the inevitable swings of the rate cycle.
The operational side of the business has evolved with equal deliberateness. The appointment of a dedicated ‘Director of Wow’ – a role conceived to ensure every client interaction exceeds expectation – and the adoption of Dominion Lending Centres’ Gold Rush CRM platform have together driven a meaningful uplift in repeat client business over the past year.
The present year of 2026 brings its own complexities. With clients emerging from a period of historically low rates and confronting sharply higher mortgage costs, Bruce has tilted his focus toward refinancing – helping existing borrowers navigate a transition that, for many, has been genuinely painful. He is also investing in AI tools to sharpen lead generation and streamline internal processes, a measured embrace of technology from someone who has never confused efficiency with the thing it is meant to serve.