Al Waha International School

A long-running British-curriculum school in Ar Rehab, Jeddah, founded 1992 as Jeddah Montessori in a small villa to serve the city's expatriate families. Now around 1,600 students from KG1 to Grade 12, IGCSE and Cambridge A Levels.

Al Waha is a CIS member, Cognia-accredited, and an attached centre of the British Council in Jeddah. The school is on the Bani Malyan Ar Rehab side of the city and runs a single-stream British curriculum with English-medium teaching from KG1 onwards.

Across more than 30 years, the school has built a steady reputation among Jeddah expat and Saudi families. Parents praise the kindergarten, the dedication of long-tenure teachers, and the sense of academic progression their children make. The campus shows its age in places, particularly the play areas and some infrastructure, and reviews note the usual variability between sections that comes with a school this size. Best fit for Jeddah families wanting an established British school at a more accessible fee point than the very top of the market, comfortable with an older campus.

• Reviews split sharply by platform and by section. Aggregate parent ratings vary by tracker: one large pool runs middling, one small pool runs uniformly positive, a third sits high. The wider parent body lands somewhere between, with strong support from current parents and persistent friction in administrative dealings.
• Boys' and girls' sections are described very differently. One parent on yaschools wrote that the boys' section had horrible teachers while the girls' section was amazing. Another older review described the school as having been better in the past but still good.
• Newer positive parent reviews praise dedicated staff, kindergarten quality and a co-curricular programme that uses visual learning over rote memorisation.
• The most consistent negative theme is administrative responsiveness. One parent wrote that there was no answer to phone calls and management did not seem to care; another flagged opaque admissions, exam fees and waitlisting practice.
• One Reddit thread on Jeddah international schools mentions Al Waha by name and describes student diversity as good; it is widely listed alongside British International School Jeddah and Jeddah Knowledge International School.