🇨🇳 International Schools in Beijing

5 schools, profiled on verifiable public data.

Beijing's international-school core sits in the Shunyi and Chaoyang/Lido expat belts and, like Shanghai, is governed by China's legal two-tier split — the single most important thing for families to grasp. Most of the flagship schools here are foreign-passport-only "schools for children of foreign personnel" (外籍人员子女学校): WAB, ISB, Dulwich Beijing and BSB Shunyi cannot enrol ordinary mainland Chinese nationals (eligibility is gated by Beijing Municipal Education Commission rules, with a narrow exception for Chinese-passport children who hold foreign permanent residency and have lived abroad over a year). Curricula span the full IB continuum (WAB), American + IB Diploma (ISB), and British→IB/A-Level (Dulwich, BSB, Harrow). China has no graded national inspectorate, so tiering is accreditation/curriculum-based and capped at A — even Harrow Beijing, which holds a current UK BSO accreditation, since the modern BSO inspection is a pass/fail standard rather than a graded "Outstanding" band. Note: some brands (e.g. Harrow) run separate bilingual entities for Chinese nationals, and one school's eligibility (Harrow Beijing, post its 2022 "Lide School" rebranding) is genuinely ambiguous in public sources — confirm directly. Fees are in RMB where disclosed; several schools route tuition to request-only schedules.

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