Karen has no shortage of school options — a good problem for a parent to have. But "international school" covers a wide range of things in Nairobi, and the label alone tells you almost nothing. What actually varies, and what to ask.
Curriculum decides your child's exits, not only their lessons
A British-curriculum school teaches to the Early Years Foundation Stage, then Key Stages 1 and 2, measured against national expectations set in England. An American-curriculum school, an IB school and a Kenyan 8-4-4 or CBC school are each doing something coherent, and different.
The useful question is where your family is likely to be in five years. A move to the UK, or to one of the hundreds of British-curriculum schools worldwide, makes continuity matter a great deal. A child who moves between systems mid-primary loses time because the sequence they were taught in stops lining up, not because they were behind.
"International" should describe the classroom, not the fee level
Some schools are international because families come from many countries. Others use the word to signal price.
Ask directly: how is English handled for a child who speaks another language at home? Are religious and cultural observances routine, or an exception someone has to request? What happens in the first fortnight for a child who has just landed in Nairobi and knows nobody?
Our classrooms open this year to families from across Nairobi's international community. What we can tell you today is how we intend to run them, and you should hold us to it.
The numbers that determine everything
Ask for two figures, and be suspicious of vagueness on either.
Maximum class size. An average of twenty-two can hide a Year 4 class of thirty-one, so ask for the ceiling, not the mean. Ours is capped at twenty-five in the founding year.
Specialist teaching. Who teaches science, music, computing and sport? A class teacher covering everything is a different offer from specialists in a laboratory and a studio.
Facilities matter per child, not on a brochure
A school with an athletics track and eight hundred pupils might give your child twenty minutes on it a fortnight. Access decides the value of a facility, not its existence.
Here a new school has a real structural advantage. Our campus was purpose-built for many hundreds of children — a four-hundred-metre all-weather track, playing fields, smart classrooms, a library, a multipurpose hall with a stage — and in the founding year, one small cohort has the use of all of it.
Karen itself
The quiet matters more than parents expect. Space to run, trees, and a commute that skips an hour of Nairobi traffic each way shape a child's week as much as the timetable does.
The question underneath all the others
Every school answers the questions above well enough. The one that separates them: will they tell you, plainly, where they stand today?
We are new, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Come and inspect it for yourself on 29 August.
