On this page
- Five principles behind the rating
- The data sources we draw on
- Weightings and how the score is built
- Inspection ratings and what they mean
- Academic outcomes, properly contextualised
- Faculty stability and qualifications
- Verified parent reviews
- Infrastructure and provision
- What we deliberately ignore
- How often ratings are updated
- Corrections, disputes and right of reply
Five principles behind the rating
Before the methodology, the principles. Every editorial decision on our site follows from these five commitments. They predate the scoring system and they outrank it whenever the two come into tension.
First, we serve parents, not schools. We accept no advertising from schools, no paid placement, no preferential treatment for institutions that buy our reports. The funding model is reader subscriptions, sponsored research with disclosed sponsors, and family services that sit downstream of the ratings. The schools we cover are not our customers.
Second, we publish what we can defend. If a data point cannot survive a phone call from a school's lawyer, it does not appear on the site. Every rating is documented internally with a source trail. When we revise a rating downward, we expect to justify the move on request.
Third, fit beats prestige. A Tier 1 inspection rating does not mean a school is the right place for any specific child. Our ratings are a starting filter, not a verdict. The school comparison and shortlist tools on the site are designed to surface fit alongside rating.
Fourth, we contextualise outcomes. Average IB scores at a school with selective entry should not be read against average IB scores at a school that admits all comers. We publish the raw outcome alongside a note on selection, intake, and cohort size, so readers can interpret the figure honestly.
Fifth, the rating is a current photograph. A school can move two bands in eighteen months, in either direction. We review every rated school at least annually, and every Tier 1 school after each new inspection cycle. The rating you read today reflects what we believe today.
The data sources we draw on
The rating draws from public inspection bodies, the schools themselves, and a verified parent panel. None of these alone is sufficient. The methodology is built around the fact that each source has a known weakness, and the combination is more reliable than any single input.
Public regulators provide the foundation. We track current inspection ratings from KHDA in Dubai, ADEK in Abu Dhabi, MOE-EduTrust in Singapore, the EDB in Hong Kong, Estyn in Wales, Ofsted and ISI in the UK, and equivalent bodies in another forty jurisdictions. Where a country lacks a school inspector, we substitute a curriculum-body audit, such as Council of International Schools accreditation or IB authorisation review.
Schools provide the second layer. Each year we send a 14-question intake to every rated school covering enrolment, faculty data, university destinations, fee schedule and special provision. Participation is voluntary, but non-participation is itself a data point, and we say so. Roughly 70 per cent of schools respond annually.
The third layer is the verified parent panel. Reviews are matched to an enrolment record before publication. We do not publish reviews from people who cannot show they had a child at the school. The panel runs to about 18,000 active parents across 1,200 schools.
Want the rating before the page is built?
Use the School Finder Quiz to surface schools that match a specific child, budget and curriculum. Or run a side-by-side check in the Compare tool.
Weightings and how the score is built
Each school is scored across five pillars on a 0 to 100 scale. The pillars are not equally weighted. The weights below were arrived at after testing several alternative configurations against a panel of educational consultants and a sample of 400 parents asked to rank schools they knew well.
| Pillar | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Inspection rating | 30% | Most recent regulator rating, weighted by recency and trajectory across the last 5 years |
| Academic outcomes | 25% | IB, A-Level, AP and university destinations adjusted for intake selectivity |
| Faculty stability | 15% | Teacher tenure, qualifications, leadership stability, pupil to teacher ratio |
| Verified parent reviews | 15% | Mean parent satisfaction, weighted by panel size and currency |
| Infrastructure and provision | 15% | Facilities, SEN and EAL provision, pastoral systems, extracurricular depth |
The composite is then mapped to a five-band rating: Outstanding, Excellent, Strong, Adequate and Developing. Bands are not equally spaced. A school in the Outstanding band sits clearly above the threshold; we do not award the top band to a school that scrapes the cut-off.
Inspection ratings and what they mean
Inspection ratings are the most-cited data point in school decisions and the most misread. A KHDA "Outstanding" is not interchangeable with an Ofsted "Outstanding". They use different frameworks and different language. We translate each regulator's framework into a comparable five-band scale, so a Hong Kong EDB rating and a Dubai KHDA rating can be read on the same axis.
We also weight trajectory. A school holding Outstanding for five cycles is scored higher than a school newly promoted after years of Good. A school slipping from Outstanding to Very Good is scored below one holding Very Good steady.
Academic outcomes, properly contextualised
Raw IB averages are misleading. A school with an average IB Diploma score of 36 in a selective intake is roughly equivalent to a school averaging 32 in a non-selective intake. Our outcomes score adjusts for three intake variables: entry selectivity, cohort size, and language profile.
For A-Level outcomes we look at A*/A percentages, but again contextualised. We publish each school's three-year mean to even out single-cohort noise, and we report alongside Russell Group and Ivy Plus destination rates where available. Schools that publish full destination lists score better than schools that publish summary statements only. Transparency is itself a quality signal.
Faculty stability and qualifications
The single best predictor of parent satisfaction in our dataset is faculty stability. Schools where the average teacher has more than five years' tenure score significantly better on parent reviews than schools with rapid turnover, even when controlling for inspection rating. Our faculty pillar tracks teacher tenure distribution, leadership tenure, qualification mix, and the pupil-to-teacher ratio.
Where a school will not publish faculty data, we record this and adjust the pillar downward. We do not assume the worst. We do, however, treat opacity on staffing as a real risk to parents whose decision will rest in part on the people who teach their child.
Verified parent reviews
The parent reviews pillar is the most labour-intensive part of the methodology. Each review is matched against an enrolment record (either supplied directly by the parent during sign-up or verified via a school confirmation step) before it appears. Reviews are weighted by currency, with a six-month half-life. Reviews from current parents count more than reviews from parents whose children have left.
We watch the distribution. A school with 80 reviews averaging 4.3 stars and a tight distribution is rated higher than a school with 12 reviews averaging 4.8 stars with one outlier complaint. Sample size matters. Outliers matter. So does whether parents come back to write a second review, which we treat as a strong signal.
Infrastructure and provision
The final pillar is the broadest. It covers facilities, SEN provision, English-language support, pastoral systems, and the depth of the extracurricular programme. We score this through a combination of school-supplied data, parent panel input, and site visits.
Not every parent values the same infrastructure. A family choosing on music provision will rank schools differently from a family choosing on SEN support. The pillar score is unbundled into sub-scores on each school profile, so readers can re-weight against the priorities of their own child.
What we deliberately ignore
Some inputs parents expect to find in a school rating do not appear in ours. The absence is deliberate.
We do not weight fees. A school is not better because it costs more, and a budget school can be excellent in its band. Fees are surfaced on every school profile and on the fee calculator, but they do not move the rating.
We do not weight prestige or brand heritage independently of outcomes. A famous brand on a new campus is rated on the campus. Several UK independent school overseas branches sit lower in our ratings than their UK parent schools.
We do not weight social media presence or marketing polish. The rating cares about what happens in classrooms, not in marketing departments.
How often ratings are updated
Every rated school is reviewed at least once a year. Tier 1 schools (those rated Outstanding or Excellent) are re-reviewed after every new inspection cycle, every new outcomes release, and on receipt of any material parent panel signal. A school's profile page shows the date of last review.
Where a school's circumstances change significantly between reviews, for example a leadership change, an inspection downgrade, or a credible safeguarding incident, we issue an interim update. We do not delay revisions to align with marketing cycles.
Corrections, disputes and right of reply
If a school disputes a rating or a factual claim, the head can write to our editorial team with the evidence. We commit to a written response within ten working days. Where the evidence stands up, we correct the page and note the correction. Where it does not, we keep the original rating and add a note that the school has disputed it. We publish disputes; we do not hide them.
Parents and former staff who spot errors should use the same channel. Every change to a rating is logged with a date and a reason.