8 April 2013
Dear BISI Community Member,
A glance at the foot of this letter should give you an indication as to its content!
In addition to being an authorised IB World School, an authorised centre for Cambridge International Examinations and an Executive Member of the Council of British International Schools, BISI has now achieved Accredited School Status with both the Council of International Schools and the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.
We join an august list of schools who have had their programmes, policies and procedures; their teaching and learning; their Guiding Statements; their Governance and Leadership; their curriculum; their financial structure; their organisational systems; their staffing (both academic and non-academic); their relationships with parents and the community; in short their complete day-to-day operations minutely examined by external agencies and found to be of the standard required of the top international schools around the world.
There are 42 ExecutiveMemberSchools in COBIS; 180 AccreditedInternationalSchools in NEASC and 385 AccreditedSchools in CIS. There are two schools in the world which simultaneously hold all three of these accreditations and BISI is one of them!
On behalf of the Chairman of the Board, we would like to thank the teaching staff, the support staff, the Board of Governors, the parents and the students and the members of the Steering Committee for their support and hard work in the two year self-study process which has led to our Accredited School Status. Everyone has played their part in the process and everyone has helped us to gain this status. BISI is an improving school and, whilst the self-study may be over for now, the process of improvement continues and there is a lot of hard work ahead of us to maintain our new found status.
These are just a few of the comments made in the CIS/NEASC report;Teachers are caring, deliver a rigorous curriculum, and are genuinely interested in facilitating learning…The entire school community was open and honest and very welcoming…This school’s Guiding Statements are more than words posted on walls; the school community lives them every day…This is indeed an international school with an international student body, an international-minded group of teachers, and there is a clear ethos of international cooperation and respect for cultures…The curriculum is infused with international/intercultural ideas… The programmes at BISI are rigorous… students take learning very seriously… learning is cool at BISI!...the school has a desire to keep moving forward… It should continue to live its ethos of internationalism/interculturalism and never lose the passion that so many have for educating young people.
The full report is 643 pages long, so please excuse us for not attaching it to this letter. In the coming months, the report will be split into manageable components and disseminated so that it can be used by everyone to drive the next phase in the continuing development of BISI.
Yours faithfully,
The BISI Senior Leadership Team