Do You Know What Educational Accreditation Actually Means?

I’ve worked in education for around 20 years, in different countries, different schools, different systems and in leadership roles. I’ve also been through accreditation processes with a range of different organisations, so when I see schools or programmes heavily promoting the fact that they are accredited, I probably look at that a bit differently to a parent seeing it from the outside.

Don't get me wrong, I understand why accreditation matters to some people. It can help with pathways, transfers, university applications and it can give families a sense that there is some external oversight. But I also think it gets treated as if it is automatically a sign of quality, and from my experience, it really isn’t that simple. Accreditation means that a school has met the expectations of a particular accreditation body. That is essentially what it means. It does not necessarily mean the learning is better, that the children are happier, that the teaching is stronger, that the environment is more inspiring or that the school is doing anything particularly innovative.

The language around accreditation has definitely changed over the years. You now see words like innovation, student-centred learning, wellbeing, agency and real-world learning appearing in these frameworks. But underneath that, schools are still usually expected to show defined curriculum structures, measurable outcomes, formal assessment processes, governance systems, improvement plans and evidence that learning is being monitored and documented. None of that is automatically bad, but it still comes from a fairly traditional idea of what an educational institution should look like, annd to be honest, from the parents I speak with, seeking an alternative education option for their children, this is exactly what they are trying to escape. And I think that is where it becomes particularly interesting in worldschooling.

A lot of families who move into worldschooling are doing it because they have become frustrated with mainstream education. They are tired of the routine of school, children sitting at desks for most of the day, bells, timetables, queues, asking permission to go to the toilet, everyone moving through the same curriculum at roughly the same pace. They want something different. They don’t necessarily want to travel halfway around the world just to put their child back into another version of school.

For me, that is one of the biggest opportunities of worldschooling. If you are in Thailand, Peru, Argentina or somewhere completely different from home, then the place itself should have an impact on the learning. You should be able to follow things that come up naturally, spend longer on something because the children are interested in it, go somewhere because it connects with what you are exploring, change direction when something unexpected happens. That becomes harder when you are tied too tightly to a predetermined structure. If everything has to be mapped, measured and evidenced against an external framework, then naturally some of that freedom starts to disappear. You begin thinking not only about what makes sense for the children in front of you and the place you are in, but also about what needs to be demonstrated to somebody outside the programme.

There is a strange contradiction in parts of alternative education where people talk about how school has barely changed in generations, how outdated the system is, how children need something different, and then becoming accredited is treated as the ultimate sign that the programme has arrived. For me, those two things don’t sit completely comfortably together. If the whole point is to question conventional education, then surely we also have to be willing to question the systems that decide what legitimate education is supposed to look like in the first place.

That doesn’t mean no structure, no standards or no accountability. I believe in all of those things. I believe children need experienced adults around them, they need challenge, they need academic development and they need proper support.

But I don’t think any of that has to look like conventional school. And I think that is really the bit parents should be interested in. Not just whether something is accredited, but what that accreditation actually means and what the children’s day really looks like once they are there.