International Schools Guide
Independent, bilingual, transparent assessments of 234 international schools across 41 cities — Asia-Pacific, the Gulf, Europe and North America. We publish only verifiable public data, and we take no payments from any school.
The hard part of choosing an international school isn't finding a list — it's reading the wildly different ways quality is judged from country to country. “Top” in Dubai means a government-inspectorate (KHDA) “Outstanding” band; in the UK or Singapore it means a verifiable BSO inspection verdict; in Tokyo, Shanghai or New York there is no graded public inspectorate at all, and “good” can only be read from accreditation depth and curriculum authorisation. Conflating those non-comparable signals is the single most common mistake families make.
So we don't publish one global ranking. We record the verifiable public facts school by school — curriculum, fees, accreditation, inspection band — and we're honest about what those facts do, and don't, tell you in each market.
How we tier — and why
We reserve the top S tier for schools that carry a genuine verbatim top inspection band — a KHDA/ADEK “Outstanding”, a UK BSO “Outstanding” — 21 schools worldwide today. In countries with no graded public inspectorate (the US, Japan, China, Canada and more) we tier on accreditation and curriculum authorisation, capped at A — we never invent a graded band a market doesn't have.
- • No payments from schools — placement is never for sale.
- • Public, verifiable data only. We never impute missing facts — where a school doesn't publish a figure, we say so.
- • University placement is always flagged 'school-reported, unverified' — never tiered.
Read the full tiering methodology, or use it as a free CC-BY-4.0 dataset (Hugging Face and Kaggle).
Browse by curriculum
Many schools offer more than one; these group the guide by system.
Browse by region & city
Asia-Pacific · 20 cities
Gulf & Middle East · 4 cities
Europe · 12 cities
North America · 5 cities
Also: international boarding schools, the Gulf regional hub, or side-by-side comparisons.