Quality assurance for international schools education
Quality Assurance or Audit?
Addressing the present needs of your business
Quality Assurance (QA):
our quality assurance for international schools reviews are designed to compare your school against the best practice found in international standards that are accredited.
These reviews can also be a preparation for accreditation.
To find out more about or quality assurance services, keep scrolling
Audit:
this is an investigation into the efficiency and efficacy of your operations, and an analysis of the information given to you by staff and managers. This looks at criteria that accreditation systems and the quality assurance checks do not consider.
Find out more about our audits and auditing procedures on our Audit page
Quality Assurance: comparing yourself to best practice in international schools
When an international school goes through an accreditation process the first time, the results often come as a shock to the owners when they don’t pass first time, and are told it will be 2-3 years before they will be able to, assuming the Board wish to continue with the process, and change what the accreditors advised then to change.
IGE’s quality assurance for international schools are a process that can prepare you well in advance of an accreditation, or simply provide you with the knowledge that you are operating to international standards. The standards that we review against can be a composite (CIS, IB, BSO…), or just one (e.g. NEASC, or BSO), depending on your journey.
A quality assurance review provides the Board and school owners with a very good understanding of the quality of education they are providing in comparison with other international schools globally, and competitor schools locally.
A quality assurance review supports your school prepare for formal accreditation.
How a quality assurance review will benefit my international school business
Our quality assurance reviews will:
give you a good understanding of what your school is providing
give you a good understanding of how your teaching staff are performing
give you a good idea of your managers’ capabilities and work
give you an insight into
prepare your school for accreditation
give you an idea as to how you compare with local schools that have been accredited
Indicators that a quality assurance review is necessary for international schools
Indicators that a quality assurance review is necessary include:
having unqualified teachers teaching the pupils
your qualified teachers are not qualified in delivering the curriculum that you offer
you do not have a record of lesson observations
managers are or have been promoted from within the teaching team
your COO is without a background in the education business
your COO is without a background in the curricula that you deliver, and your management may be inexperienced or unqualified
a significant number of your staff educators (teachers and managers), have been in post over 3 years
significant numbers of staff leave within or at the end of their first year. (This is a strong indicator of bullying)
significant behaviour problems in the school
a significant number of complaints from parents
a lack of quantitative or observational data
continually poor test results
analysis of the external exam results that do not reflect parental experience (high results, but complaints that pupils are not passing exams)
Recommended frequency of your quality assurance reviews
We recommend that international school owners use our quality assurance checks throughout the life of their schools. Ideally, these should take place between over annual to 5 year cycles, depending upon the number of identifiable risk factors. (Download our QA Review check-list here.)
Quality assurance for international schools education is an important process that informs school owners as to how their school is performing, This is especially important for those schools not subscribed to an accreditation body for cyclical accreditation reviews.