What Are International Schools Like In Saudi Arabia? A Parent’s Firsthand Experience
I’m leaning against a sun-warmed concrete wall outside the secondary school gate in north Riyadh, sipping lukewarm karak I bought from the street vendor down the road, and watching kids stream out after the last bell. It’s 3pm in October, and the air still shimmers with heat, enough that the hem of my linen shirt sticks to my back. My 13-year-old, Lila, emerges 10 minutes late, backpack covered in a mix of climate protest stickers and a hand-painted keychain her Saudi friend made her, and immediately tells me they organized a walk-out at lunch to demand the school swap all single-use plastic water bottles for reusable stations.
Before we moved here from Vancouver a year ago, I spent three nights scrolling old expat forums worrying what international schools here would actually be like. Most of the posts were 10 years old, talking about strict gender segregation, limited curriculum, and no room for student expression. I almost pushed for homeschooling, before a friend who’d lived here for five years told me things had changed a lot.
When we first toured Lila’s current school, I was surprised to see co-ed classes in all grades, something the old forums claimed never happened. The principal, a British expat who’s been here for eight years, told me that most new international schools built after 2018 are fully co-ed, and even older established schools are adjusting their policies to match shifting demands. Forty percent of the student body at Lila’s school is Saudi, most from families that want an internationally recognized curriculum to prepare their kids for university abroad, or for the new international programs offered at Saudi Arabia’s own top research universities. The other 60% is expats from 62 different countries, everyone from renewable energy engineers like my husband to nurses, foreign teachers, and embassy staff.
All international schools here have to follow government requirements for local classes, no matter what international curriculum they offer. Every student takes Arabic language classes, and Muslim students take Islamic studies. Non-Muslim students like Lila take Saudi culture and ethics instead, which she actually enjoys. Last month she came home and taught us how to properly serve coffee for guests, which has already come in handy when our neighbors invited us over for Iftar during Ramadan. We chose the IB program for Lila, but there are schools across the country offering American AP, British National Curriculum, and the International Primary Curriculum for younger kids, same as any international school hub around the world.
Lila is dyslexic, and back in Vancouver she had a formal accommodation plan: extra time on tests, audiobooks for all her textbooks, check-ins with a learning support teacher once a week. I was terrified schools here wouldn’t be able to accommodate that. A lot of schools list “learning support” on their website, but when I started asking questions during our tour round, some smaller schools only had one part-time support person for 400 kids. That’s not enough for a kid who needs regular check-ins and adjusted assignments. Our current school has a full-time special education coordinator and two part-time support teachers, and they adjusted Lila’s plan within her first two weeks. It’s not perfect—they don’t have the same level of specialized one-on-one support that she had in Vancouver—but it’s enough for her to keep up and feel confident.
If you’re a parent planning a move here and your kid has any kind of learning difference, don’t just take the school’s word that they offer support. Ask how many full-time support staff they have, how many students with the same need they currently support, and ask to meet the support team before you enroll. That one question saved us a lot of stress we would have had if we’d signed up at the first school we toured.
There are practical things most new parents don’t think to ask about either. International schools aren’t cheap here. Tuition for secondary school at Lila’s school is around 75,000 SAR a year, which is roughly $20,000 USD. Most expat work packages include full tuition, but if you’re a local parent or moving here independently, that’s a huge expense to plan for. The school calendar is different too: the weekend is Saturday and Sunday, which most people don’t realize until they get here, and during Ramadan, school days are cut almost in half, running from 8am to 1pm instead of 3pm. That means you have to arrange extra childcare if you work full time, which is something I forgot to plan for our first Ramadan here, and it was a bit of a scramble.
It’s not all smooth. Our school’s new gym and performing arts center has been under construction for 18 months, and there’s still no set opening date. If you live outside of Riyadh, Jeddah, or the Eastern Province, your options are really limited—there might be only one international school within a two-hour drive, if any. Some of the older, more established schools have waiting lists a year or more long, so you have to apply as early as possible, even if you don’t have your move dates confirmed.
Last night, Lila showed me videos from the traditional folk dance performance she did with the school’s culture club last week. She’s already talking about applying to the new environmental science program at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology when she graduates, which is something I never would have imagined when we were packing our bags in Vancouver. It’s not the experience I expected it to be. The outdated stereotypes I read about online don’t match the messy, diverse school that Lila goes to every day. There are still things we adjust to every year, from rising tuition to sudden national holidays that throw off our work schedules. But right now, it’s working for us.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What Are International Schools Like In Saudi Arabia