Credit for quality

Parents naturally want the best they can afford. But when faced with a plethora of possibilities, how do you begin to sort the wood from the chaff?

Having accreditation by a reliable independent body can be one way of assuring parents that a school is a provider of quality education. However, it is very much more than that. Schools who are serious about their work also use the process to develop their institutions in a way that fine-tunes their good qualities and strengthens their weaknesses.

CIS Director, Mike Maybury

“It’s a stamp of approval from a parent’s point of view but from a school’s point of view it’s all about school improvement,” explains Mike Maybury, recently-retired Executive Director of the Council of International Schools (CIS). The not-for-profit organisation provides services such as recruitment assistance and consultation to international schools the world over. One of their major remits, however, is to provide an accreditation service. To date, around 250 schools are either accredited or are in the process of being accredited by CIS around the globe.

“In the vast majority of international schools, students are taking either British ‘A’ levels, American AP or the International Baccalaureate, so the quality of the education of the students is already being externally assessed,” says Maybury. “What the accreditation process is about is setting basic standards and then looking at how schools can improve. It also has the additional benefit that if a school is accredited, then the children attending those schools will be pretty well guaranteed an education of high quality.”

Many people might assume that accreditation is akin to an inspection but that is not the case at all. The process carried out by CIS is a far more thorough and constructive one. Importantly, the emphasis is on helping schools becoming better places as a direct result of having been through accreditation. It is not a means of judging a school’s performance and leaving it to sink or swim.

“We credit schools based upon two basic questions,” explains Maybury. “Firstly, and most importantly, is the school doing what it says its doing? Secondly, is the school meeting the standards which we have developed over the last 30 or so years?”

With CIS accreditation, schools are first required to take part in a self-study. This takes the form of a huge document, compiled by the whole staff and other members of the school community, which reflects upon the strengths and “areas that require strengthening” of the school. The document is then sent off to CIS who subsequently assemble a team of trained practicing educators to visit the school some months later.

The team spends a week talking to everybody from staff, parents and students to caterers and security guards. At the end of the week, the team write a report which reflects on both the self-study and their own evaluations before making a recommendation to CIS as to whether or not the schools deserves to be accredited. Officials at CIS read the report and then grant or decline accreditation.

But that’s not the end of it. If the school is successfully accredited, they then have to submit a further report, one year on, outlining the actions they have taken based upon the recommendations of the visiting team. Yet another report is due after five years and when the school nears it’s 9^th anniversary of accreditation, the process starts all over again.

“The strength of the report is that the recommendations in it were devised in the main by the staff of the school,” notes Maybury, “so that the resistance to change that you get in some organisations is not as fierce in this situation because the teachers said that these things needs to be done. So, in fact, they get done.”

One school that has recently been through the initial process is KIS International School in the Huay Kwang district of Bangkok. The decision to seek accreditation was taken by the school’s administration some years ago and, in November 2003, the school learned that they had successfully been accredited by CIS.

KIS Head, Sally Holloway

“We knew that accreditation was something we had to do,” says Sally Holloway, Head of KIS. “It is a regulation in Thailand that you are accredited.”

As it happened, the Washington International School, with which KIS is affiliated, had also been through CIS accreditation and, after much research, it was decided that CIS was the most appropriate for KIS as well.

“The pattern of accreditation is very valuable, because it’s carried out by your peers,” says Holloway. “It’s not really judgmental because they come in to affirm that you are who you say you are and you do what you say you do. On top of that, they look for areas of improvement. Throughout the experience, you’re getting ideas, gaining an insight with fresh eyes. This is useful because normally you’re working so hard on day-to-day things, you’re constantly looking downwards. So it’s as if someone lifts up your chin and says ‘okay have a look at this, take a step back’.”

The process began way back in May 2002 when KIS received a preliminary visit from a small CIS team. Their job was to take a look round the school and decide whether it was ready to begin accreditation. Once the green light was given, the school’s administration set about preparing the self-study.

June van den Bos

The mammoth task of co-ordinating the project was given to KIS Prinicipal June van den Bos. “It was an awful lot of my workload for two years,” she says, “and in the last six months, it was my workload!”

But van den Bos always knew it would be worth the effort. “My role was to oversee the implementation of the self-study across the whole organisation from across the school community,” she relates. “I developed committees that had a representation from all areas. So, for example, if you were academic staff, you had the opportunity to sit on a committee that looked at administration. This gave you an insight into what other people do within the organisation and the importance of everyone else’s role. Sometimes, when we are doing our own job, we forget how all the rest of it fits together, so it was good for promoting a sense of unity across the school.”

Gerry Campbell

Indeed, according to many staff, the most valuable part of the accreditation process was the self-study. “Once the team wrote the report, we did make some rather big changes,” says Gerry Campbell, the PYP Coordinator at KIS, “but I think probably, if you weighed it out, we made as many changes before they came and made sure that we are who we say we are.

“I think it’s empowering for staff because it’s not just coming from your administration. It’s all about staff looking at what we need to do. We got to make recommendations in a lot of cases, so we actually saw change happening quite quickly.”

The week of the team visit began with an informal dinner between team members and the school community. This is always designed to reduce some of the tension which will naturally come as staff prepare to be monitored and questioned throughout the week. However, many teachers spoke of being fairly relaxed once the team had arrived, which brought its advantages as far as the process was concerned.

Cassie Blyth-Sullivan

“It was really just the average week at KIS,” recalls Cassie Blyth-Sullivan who is Kindergarten Coordinator at the school. “Pretty much overall we worked the same as we always do. But we were well aware that there were other people in the school, walking around with their eyes wide open, who could come up to us at any time during the school day and ask us questions.”

It certainly helped that those in the visiting team knew their stuff. “You could tell that they were ‘early childhood’ trained people,” says Blyth-Sullivan, “because of the way they spoke about early childhood, the learning environment and the children’s experience. Everything came form an early childhood perspective, which made it so much easier when we were discussing things because we didn’t have to do a lot of explanation beforehand.”

Head of School, Sally Holloway was very impressed by the visiting team. “It was not at all threatening,” she says. “The Team Chair had communication skills that were spot on. Before they came, he had written an e-mail saying that ‘we’re not here to judge.’ So, because he had created that relationship, I decided from that moment on that I was going to be very open to it. I wasn’t going to be defensive and I wanted to hear what they had to say. If you’re open to it, you get so much more out of accreditation. If the school kept trying to protect itself, in case it wasn’t accredited, it just wouldn’t function.”

This flexibility and mutual trust is the major advantage of accreditation over the process of inspection. For example, the inspectorate of education in the United Kindom, known as OFSTED, was once notorious for unnerving teachers with their abrasive style. Expectations were rigid and educators would often find themselves staying up late at night, preparing documents for show rather than for any useful purpose.

OFSTED have since mellowed a little but the practice of inspection has only moderately evolved. In any case, it largely remains a one-way process, which has obvious limitations.

One of the strengths of accreditation is that it invariably involves the whole school community. Self-study committees, for instance, includes parents and representatives from the Board of Governors as well as staff, which has the added benefit of providing them with an insight into how the school works.

Shalini Gosh

“The parents felt very involved,” says Shalini Gosh, mother of a Grade 1 student. “Parents on committees also asked other parents advice, so even those parents who weren’t on committees had their say.

“As parents, we have more confidence in the school. This is because it is now part of a huge community of international schools and the fact that my son, if we wanted him admitted into another international school, would be recognised as being part of that community already.”

Kumaree Chinawat

The Board of Governors were equally enthused. “We have been up and running for the last few of years,” notes Board member Kumaree Chinawat. “It’s extremely valuable to have us look at ourselves compared to the criteria that CIS sets, so we can act on that reflection instead of running round in circles. Is what we’ve done up to standard? Are we going in the right direction? It’s good for making us think about where we go in the future.”

There are many organisations offering independent accreditation services to schools. The process differs slightly in each case but, for most, the outcomes are intended to be very similar.

Few would argue, however, that when accreditation is done thoroughly, everyone gains. “If you talk to pretty well anybody who has been through the process,” says Mike Maybury, “they’ll tell you that they’ve benefited. It also has some hidden benefits, particularly in large schools – you’ll find that people from different parts of the school who have never spoken to each other before are meeting to talk about the school as a whole. And most schools will tell you it’s a real unifying experience.