Accreditation & legitimacy: how to verify a school’s claims yourself

Why this isn’t on faith

Curriculum and pedagogy are things you can partly assess yourself, by reading a syllabus or visiting a classroom. Accreditation is different — it’s a formal, third-party judgment about whether a school actually meets the standards it claims to, and the only way to know it’s current is to check the accrediting body directly, not the badge on the school’s homepage. A logo doesn’t expire when a school’s status does.

IB authorization

Being an “IB World School” is programme-specific and requires formal authorization from the IB Organization for each programme — PYP, MYP, DP, or CP — separately; authorization for the DP doesn’t automatically cover the PYP, and vice versa (see Curriculum types for what each programme actually covers). The IB also has a “candidate school” status for schools still going through authorization, which schools sometimes feature just as prominently on their marketing pages as full authorization, even though it isn’t the same thing. The IB publishes an official, searchable directory of every authorized school and programme — that directory, not the school’s own site, is the reliable way to confirm current status.

Cambridge registration

Schools offering Cambridge IGCSE or A Level must be registered Cambridge exam centers, and Cambridge International maintains its own searchable school directory to confirm this. Registration can be programme-specific too — a school might run Cambridge Primary and Lower Secondary without being a registered A Level center, for instance — so it’s worth checking the specific qualification your child would sit, not just “Cambridge” as a blanket claim.

CIS (Council of International Schools)

CIS is a membership and accreditation body that evaluates schools against a broad set of institutional standards — governance, safeguarding, teaching quality, and more — through a multi-year review cycle rather than a one-time badge. CIS accreditation (distinct from plain CIS membership, which has a lower bar) is checkable through CIS’s own accredited-school listing.

WASC (Western Association of Schools and Colleges)

WASC is a US regional accreditor that also accredits international schools abroad, including a large share of Japan’s American-curriculum schools, through periodic self-study and site-visit cycles. Like CIS, WASC accreditation status — and its renewal date — is published by WASC directly rather than only by the school.

MEXT status in Japan

This is the layer that’s easy to miss if you’re new to Japan: most international schools here are not accredited as regular Japanese schools by MEXT (Japan’s Ministry of Education) — they’re typically registered under Japan’s “miscellaneous school” (各種学校, kakushu gakkō) category, or operate without formal Japanese school status at all.

That doesn’t affect IB, Cambridge, CIS, or WASC recognition, but it can matter for two practical things: whether attendance counts toward Japan’s compulsory education requirement for children holding Japanese nationality, and whether graduates can sit Japanese university entrance exams without extra qualification steps (a status some schools hold specifically for this purpose). If either applies to your family, ask the school directly which category it falls under — it’s a Japan-specific question that a US or UK accreditation doesn’t answer.

How to verify it

• Look the school up in the accrediting body’s own directory (IB, Cambridge, CIS, WASC) rather than trusting a logo on its website.
• Check that authorization or accreditation covers the specific programme your child would enter, not just the school in general.
• Note the difference between “authorized / accredited” and “candidate” status.
• If Japanese university entrance or compulsory-education status matters for your family, ask about MEXT category directly.
• Cross-reference against InterCon’s school database, where we verify tuition and curriculum data against source documents rather than repeating a school’s own marketing.

A few real examples

These three Japan-based schools illustrate how differently the picture can look once you check each body directly, rather than relying on any single school as a template:

Canadian Academy runs the full IB continuum and its PYP years follow the IB’s mandated inquiry framework. The American School in Japan runs an AP-based American curriculum with no IB programme at all, accredited through WASC rather than CIS. None of these are claims you need to take from us or from the schools themselves — each is independently checkable through the relevant body’s own directory in a few minutes.