International Education - for Saints or Sinners?

When the International Schools Journal celebrated its 30th birthday in 2011, I sent a message of congratulation to the editor, Caroline Ellwood, which contained the following observation:The growth and spread of international education (in name if not always in substance) have taken it far beyond the heartland of international schools. Its numerical centre of gravity has shifted elsewhere... (Walker, 2011)Today, four years later, it is possible to quantify that statement thanks to the organization International Schools Consultancy Research which has tracked the rapid expansion of the international schools market. The results are astonishing. According to ISC Research (Brummitt and Keeling, 2013) there were 6400 international schools around the world in 2013, an increase of nearly 150% over the figure for the year 2000. The top f ive countries leading the international schools market were the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, China, India and Japan, each with more than 200 schools.At the same time, the percentage of those schools engaged with the International Baccalaureate (surely one of the signs of belonging to that 'heartland of international schools') had fallen to 23% (Bunnell, 2014). There were, for example, only nine IB World Schools in Pakistan, compared to no fewer than 350 listed by ISC Research. So what is going on? The answer, of course, lies in the chosen definition of an 'international school'.Defining, or even describing, an international school has challenged academics ever since the adjective 'international' was first included in a school's official title - probably that of the International School of Geneva in 1924. One expert in the field (Hayden, 2006) has argued that it is 'of little value to discuss prerequisites - or even, perhaps, to attempt a categorization' and one of the problems has indeed been the use of prerequisites - the type of pupil, the type of teacher, the type of parent, the type of governor and so on. Not surprisingly, there always seems to be an exception to the rule.ISC Research has adopted a different approach, with a def inition based upon the school's learning. It accepts any school onto its database provided it 'delivers a curriculum to any combination of infant, primary or secondary students, wholly or partly in English outside an English-speaking country' (Brummitt & Keeling, p25). The definition is helpful but f lawed since it eliminates some of the world's best known international schools (the United Nations International School in New York, Atlantic College in the UK and Glenunga International High School in South Australia to name but a few). It also implies that the IB programmes are international in English, but not when studied in French or Spanish.However, the definition does help us to understand the huge recorded growth in the number of 'international schools': they are largely schools which are providing an English-style education for the children of wealthy, local middle-class families, particularly in the Middle East and Asia. By 2008 these two regions accounted for nearly half of the 'international school' market. As Bunnell expresses it (2014, p140) 'The majority of students in international schools are seemingly no longer there "by accident''.'ISC Research has noted (Brummitt & Keeling, p32) that 45% of their listed schools were studying either an IB programme or one of the other international programmes such as the International Primary Curriculum or those offered by Cambridge International Examinations. That means that some 22% - or about 1400 schools - were studying a non-IB international programme, providing healthy competition for the IB. But what about the 3500 schools offering a national (mainly English) curriculum - what right have they to the title 'international'?A brief study of the website pages of some of these 'international schools' reveals a confusing set of claims. The use of the word 'international' is clearly deemed to enhance the local reputation of a school and it is justified in different ways: the multicultural nature of the students; the location of the school in a cosmopolitan city; or the international experience of the Principal and staff. …