Do you know how to tell if a school is a legitimate international school?
This post is for you if you don’t know how. This post is also for you if your child is already enrolled in an international school and you want to check if it is indeed a legitimate international school. Thankfully, it is very easy to determine the legitimacy of an international school. The International Association of School Librarianship (IASL) provided criteria and this post will discuss every single one of them. All you have to do is refer to the list and inquire accordingly.
The IASL is an international organization, composed of 1,600+ members from 52 countries, that is dedicated to ensuring excellent and quality education. It has been around since the 1960s.
Why is it important to know if an international school is legitimate?
- You don’t want to waste money.
International schools have significantly higher tuition fees. Parents are willing to pay higher fees because they know the advantages that their child will be benefiting from. All such money will be for nothing if your child’s school is not a legitimate international school. This is because, in spite of all the additional educational expenditure that you’ve undertaken, all of your child’s efforts will not be acknowledged properly. Your child would still be considered a student who did not graduate from an international school if your child graduated from an illegitimate international school. Why pay for an illegitimate one when you can look for one that is legitimate and can actually make a difference in your child’s future? Hence, it is important to determine a school’s legitimacy as early as possible.
- You don’t want to waste your child’s time, energy, and effort.
It will be heartbreaking for you and your child if you will belatedly discover that they are enrolled in a regular school when you thought all the while that your child was enrolled in an international school. An international school curriculum is extremely strenuous and rigorous. All of your child’s work will amount to almost nothing as all will not be recognized by schools abroad.
- You don’t want all your hard work to not make a difference in your child’s life.
You are after securing a bright future for your child. So much so that you’re willing to spend extra (so much extra!) on your child’s education. All will be for nothing if you’d end up enrolling your child in an illegitimate and non accredited international school. It will be tragic as you could easily have paid for the same amount of money towards a legitimate international school but you instead poured your finances into an illegitimate one. All such could have been easily avoided if only you asked all the right questions and did due research.
To effectively avoid the given circumstances, you should simply inquire about the following to effectively determine the legitimacy of an international school:
- Inquire about its curriculum.
The answer that you should be looking for: a legitimate international school uses an international curriculum.
You should inquire about the kind of curriculum that a school that is claiming to be an international school provides. Such school should offer at least one or all of the following curricula:
- English National Curriculum (British)
- International Baccalaureate (IB)
- US Curriculum
Bangkok Prep is a British international school in Bangkok that offers a programme based on the English National Curriculum. If you wish to have your child study at the University of Oxford or any British university, it would do well if you would enroll him or her in Bangkok Prep. Look for an international school that offers the US Curriculum if you want your child to study in an American university – like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton – in the future.
- Inquire about its accreditation.
The answer that you should be looking for: a legitimate international school should be duly accredited by authorized international organizations.
One or more of the following should duly accredit a legitimate international school:
- Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC)
- New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC)
- Council of International Schools (CIS)
- The Council of British International Schools (COBIS)
- International School Quality Mark Accreditation
- ASIC School Accreditation
- Inquire about the transferability of students.
The answer that you should be looking for: a legitimate international school should ensure that it is easy for their students to transfer from one international school to another with all credits and units fully accredited.
It should be easy for students to transfer to different schools abroad with all finished units fully accredited.
- Inquire about its population.
The answer that you should be looking for: a legitimate international school has a defined teacher-student ratio of 15:1.
Legitimate international schools provide intensive and dedicated instruction, evaluation, and monitoring from teachers.
- Inquire about its student body: is it multilingual and multinational?
The answer that you should be looking for: a legitimate international school has a student body that is multinational and multilingual.
Legitimate international schools have students of different nationalities that speak different languages.
- Inquire about its faculty.
The answer that you should be looking for: a legitimate international school should have teachers from different countries.
A legitimate international school has a diverse faculty from different countries and fields of expertise.
- Inquire about its enrollment process.
The answer that you should be looking for: a legitimate international school should have an inclusive and non-selective enrollment process.
A legitimate international school does not discriminate.
- Inquire about its language of instruction.
The answer that you should be looking for: a legitimate international school uses English as its language of instruction.
A legitimate international school instructs students in English.