International Schools as legitimate institutions

The past decade has seen major changes in the landscape of international schooling (Bunnell, 2014). There has been a huge increase in the number of institutions both claiming to be, and being categorized as, an ‘international’ school (Brummitt, 2007; Keeling, 2012 and 2015). This is coupled with an increase in diversity of provision. It has always been conceptualized that international schools span a wide spectrum between being ‘ideology-led’ and ‘market-led’, yet this model arguably now has depth as well as breadth, as tiers of schools begin to appear and the market continues to fragment in terms of perceived quality and the emergence of globally recognised ‘brands’ of schools, many of which are commercially operated.