🇨🇳 International Schools in Shanghai

5 schools, profiled on verifiable public data.

Shanghai has one of Asia's deepest international-school markets — but the first thing internationally-mobile families must understand is China's legal two-tier split. 'Schools for children of foreign personnel' (外籍人员子女学校) such as Shanghai American School and Dulwich Pudong are foreign-passport-only: they cannot enrol ordinary mainland Chinese nationals (eligibility is gated by Shanghai Municipal Education Commission rules, with narrow exceptions for overseas-born or foreign-PR children). Several leading schools — Concordia, YCIS, Wellington International — are SHMEC-regulated international schools admitting foreign passport holders plus specific returnee/HK-Macau-Taiwan/foreign-PR pathways, and some run a bilingual sister school (e.g. Wellington ↔ Huili) for Chinese-national families. Curricula span American/AP, British (IGCSE→IB), and genuinely bilingual English–Chinese models. China has no graded national inspectorate, so tiering is accreditation/curriculum-based and capped at A; quality rests on CIS/WASC/IB authorization and school-reported results. Fees are published in RMB where disclosed at all — many top schools route tuition to request-only schedules.

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