ABSTRACT

Matters pertaining to international schooling rarely occupy space in general handbooks of education. There may be several reasons for this. For decades, international schools served the primary role of educating the children of highly mobile business and diplomatic elites and, normally teaching the national curricula of an affiliated state, were few in number. The rapid establishment of international schools after the Second World War meant that children no longer needed to be separated from expatriate parents for their schooling years to be educated in boarding schools in their home countries (Hayden & Thompson, 2008). Serving international elites, such schools were positioned as islands outside of the local education system and the societal cultures in which they were located, recruiting teachers from overseas to teach the respective national curricula. Small in scale, international schools had little relevance to state school systems and hence to researchers.