How to Find a Reliable International Cambridge School in Riyadh: What I Learned From My Search
It’s 9pm in my kitchen in Al Malqa, my coffee has gone cold, and my 7-year-old son Zain is coloring dinosaurs on the back of a crumpled school flyer. I have 15 tabs open on my laptop, all showing international schools in Riyadh, and my phone is pinging with messages from the expat parent group I joined after we moved here from Dubai six months ago. Zain was already two years into Cambridge Primary when we left Dubai, and we didn’t want to switch curriculums and disrupt his progress—especially since he has mild dyslexia and has just started getting the reading support he needs. So every free minute I’ve had for a month has gone to one search: help me find an international Cambridge school in Riyadh that fits what we need.
I started the way most people do, I guess: I googled “top Cambridge schools Riyadh” and booked open houses at the big, well-known schools everyone talks about in the Diplomatic Quarter. The first one I visited had a marble admin lobby and an astroturf playground the size of a small football field. Every surface looked perfect, but when I asked the head of primary about class sizes, she hesitated before saying they average 25 to 28 kids per class, with one part-time aide per year group. When I asked how many learning support specialists they had for 600 primary students, she said two. I left that open house feeling like I was being unreasonable for wanting more for Zain, like maybe that was just the standard here.
I vented about it a week later to Lina, a mom I met at our neighborhood park while we watched our kids climb the rusted jungle gym. She’d moved to Riyadh from Amman three years earlier and gone through the same search for a Cambridge school for her daughter. She pushed her daughter’s swing once and said, “Stop chasing the schools that spend the most on Instagram ads. Write down three non-negotiables first, then cross off every school that doesn’t check all three boxes. Don’t compromise on those, no matter how fancy the campus is.”
That was the shift I needed. I sat down that night after Zain went to bed and wrote mine out: one, fully accredited by Cambridge Assessment International Education, with the full pathway from primary through IGCSE and A-levels (we might stay here through high school, so I didn’t want to have to switch schools again later). Two, primary class sizes under 20, so Zain can get the extra check-ins he needs with reading. Three, no more than 30 minutes of commute from our house—peak hour traffic on Riyadh’s ring roads is no joke, and I didn’t want Zain spending an hour and a half in the car every day tired before he even gets to class.
Next, I did the obvious thing no one had told me to do earlier: I went to the official Cambridge International website, used their school search directory, and filtered for accredited schools in Riyadh. That cut out 8 schools right away that were calling themselves “Cambridge-aligned” or “Cambridge-style” but weren’t officially accredited. If we ever move again, Zain’s credits need to transfer, and unaccredited schools can’t guarantee that. When I crossed off the schools that didn’t meet my three non-negotiables, I ended up with just three options left, down from 15 I’d started with.
Lina also told me to skip waiting for the next open house and email to ask for a visit on a regular school day. Open houses are curated, she said—you only see what they want you to see. I emailed all three schools and asked if I could come on a Wednesday morning, sit in on a Year 3 class for 15 minutes, and talk to a current class teacher for 10 minutes. Two said that wasn’t possible, only pre-scheduled open house visits. The third, a smaller school in Al Nakheel, said yes, come anytime.
I brought Zain with me, and we sat in the back of the Year 3 class. The teacher stopped every 10 minutes to walk around and check in with kids who were stuck on their work. When Zain hesitated to join a group reading activity, she knelt down next to him and asked if he wanted to try a page, and when he stumbled on a couple words, she waited for him to sound it out instead of jumping in to help. After the class, I asked the principal for the last three years of IGCSE and A-level pass rates, broken down by student cohort. A lot of schools brag about high overall pass rates, but I’d heard too many stories of schools pushing low-performing students to drop out before exams to bump up their stats. She pulled up a full public report right there on her computer, no hesitation. She said 84% of their students get A-C, and every student is allowed to take their exams, no exceptions. The commute from my house was 22 minutes, even at peak drop off, and the annual fees for Year 3 were 47,000 SAR—less than half what the big Diplomatic Quarter school quoted me. I checked their accreditation against the Cambridge directory that night, and it was current and valid.
Zain started after the September break, and it’s been three months now. It’s not perfect. The library is smaller than the one at the fancy DQ school, they don’t have a competitive swimming team like my nephew’s school does, and Zain still complains that art club is only once a week instead of the twice he had in Dubai. I pack his lunch every day because the canteen only has one vegetarian option a week, and there’s still a waiting list for the after-school chess club he wants to join.
But last week, his learning support teacher emailed me to say he’d moved up two reading levels in two months. He came home last Friday with a diorama of a camel he made for geography, chattering the whole drive home about how his teacher let him pick any animal he wanted for the project. We might move back to Dubai in three years, we might stay. I don’t know if this will be the school Zain finishes high school at, and I still worry sometimes if I made the right choice. But right now, it checks all our boxes. If you’re starting your own search, you don’t need to pick the school everyone says is the best. You just need to pick the one that’s best for your kid.
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