How do you know that a school truly reaches an international standard?

Well, the only real way is to look for three things. One is authorisation by an organisation such as the International Baccalaureate (IB) whose web page states:

"The International Baccalaureate (IB) offers high quality programmes of international education to a worldwide community of schools. There are more than 658,000 IB students at 2,405 schools in 129 countries."

Our school has recently had successful pre-authorisation visits for IB PYP and MYP and is due for full authorisation visits in May and September 2009.

Another way is to find out if the school is accredited or has been accepted for accreditation by an international schools accreditation agency. Taihu is proud to announce that we have been accepted as a candidate school by the Council for International Schools (CIS - www.cois.org), the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC - www.acswasc.org) based in California and the National Centre for Schools Curriculum and Textbook Development (NCCT - www.ncctac.org) here in China. The CIS website makes the following statement:

"The central purpose of CIS is to enable member organisations to achieve and deliver the highest standards in International Education