How to read CIS accreditation on a school website | The International Schools Guide

The brief

CIS is the most portable international school accreditation. 740+ schools, 121 countries.
It checks governance, safeguarding, and learning. It does not rank teaching quality.
"Member," "candidate," and "accredited" are three different statuses. Only one is the badge.
The standard is renewed every five years through a peer-review visit.
The badge is a threshold, not a ranking. Schools that hold it are not ordered by CIS against each other.

CIS, briefly

CIS is the Council of International Schools. Independent, not-for-profit, headquartered in Leiden in the Netherlands. The body was founded as ECIS at Collège du Léman in Versoix, Switzerland, in March 1965; the accreditation arm spun off as CIS in 2003 and moved to Leiden. Over 740 schools across 121 countries currently hold its accreditation. The cycle runs five years and centres on a peer-review visit by educators from other CIS-accredited schools, not by government inspectors.

CIS is unusual in two ways. It is curriculum-agnostic: the same protocol covers a British school in Hong Kong and an American school in Madrid. And it has joint-evaluation agreements with the three big American regional accreditors (NEASC, MSA-CESS, WASC) and with the International Baccalaureate Organisation, so one team's visit can satisfy several agencies at once. That is why CIS appears on so many international school websites: the badge travels.

Collège du Léman in Versoix, where the body that became CIS was founded as ECIS in March 1965.

What CIS checks

CIS publishes one set of standards, currently in their tenth edition, organised into three domains.

Domain	What it covers	Evidence the team checks
Purpose, Practices and Planning	Mission, governance, finance, leadership, admissions	Board minutes, strategic plan, accounts, head's appraisal
Guiding Principles	Stated values in practice: ethics, global citizenship, languages, intercultural learning	Curriculum, student work, surveys, programme audits
Learning and Well-being	Teaching, assessment, pastoral care, safeguarding, university guidance	Lesson observations, learner data, safeguarding records, destinations

Safeguarding sits inside Learning and Well-being. It is the area where the bar has tightened most over the last decade. After a string of safeguarding failures at international schools, CIS and other international accreditors set up the International Taskforce on Child Protection in 2014. Recruitment vetting, supervision, mandatory reporting across jurisdictions: all checked, and the area where accreditation is most likely to be deferred or withdrawn.

What CIS doesn't check

Whether the class teacher next September will be excellent. Whether the head will still be there in two years. Whether the school culture is a fit for a particular family. Whether fees are good value.

CIS verifies that the school has functional governance, coherent programmes, and a credible safeguarding system. It does not rank the schools that clear the bar. The badge is a threshold, not an ordering. The two most common misreads are confusing CIS with a quality ranking, and confusing "CIS member" with "CIS accredited."

Member, candidate, accredited

Status	What it means	What it signals
Member	Pays annual fees and signed the code of ethics	Modest. The school is in the CIS ecosystem
Candidate	Formally in the accreditation process, working through self-study	Committed but not yet evaluated
Accredited	Passed a full team evaluation; the Accreditation Committee awarded accreditation	The full quality mark

"Authorised," "affiliated," and "endorsed" are not CIS terms. The CIS directory carries every school's exact status.

Ecolint in Geneva, the world's first international school (founded 1924), is CIS-accredited. The credential is older than the IB, which Ecolint also helped to create.

Four questions a CIS-accredited school can answer

These are the questions a school holding live CIS accreditation can answer without difficulty. The answers, or the absence of them, carry information either way.

Accredited or member? The CIS directory lists every school's exact status, separate from the school's own marketing.
When was the most recent Team Evaluation Visit, and when is the next scheduled? A school six months past a clean visit and a school whose accreditation is up for renewal are in different positions.
Will the school share the visit report, or at least its commendations and recommendations? CIS does not publish the reports; the schools do.
What three things changed after the last report? The output of an accreditation visit is the report, not the badge.

The badge is a threshold, not a ranking. CIS does not order the schools that clear the bar against each other. The granular work of comparing two CIS-accredited schools in the same city is about leadership, results, fit, and parent voice, and lies outside what CIS verifies.

FAQs

Is CIS the same as ECIS?

No. ECIS (the Educational Collaborative for International Schools) and CIS have been separate organisations since 2003. ECIS is a professional development body. CIS does the accreditation. A school can be a member of one, the other, both, or neither.

How long does CIS accreditation last?

Five years. A mid-cycle review at around the 2.5-year mark checks the school has acted on the visit's recommendations. Accreditation can be deferred or withdrawn at any point in the cycle.

Can a school lose its CIS accreditation?

Yes. CIS can defer, suspend, or withdraw accreditation if mandatory requirements are not met, if a safeguarding failure comes to light, or if the school exits membership. It is rare, and CIS does not publish a public list of withdrawn schools.

Does CIS accreditation help with university applications?

Indirectly. Universities outside the school's home country treat transcripts and predicted grades from a CIS-accredited school as credible without further verification. CIS does not add credit to a UCAS or Common App file. Its absence at a less-known school can slow the process while admissions teams check the credential.

Is CIS the same as the Independent Schools Inspectorate?

No. The Independent Schools Inspectorate (ISI) inspects UK independent schools and conducts British Schools Overseas inspections overseas on behalf of the UK Department for Education. CIS is international and curriculum-agnostic. Some British international schools hold both.

Sources: Council of International Schools, CIS About, International Accreditation overview, CIS partners, International Taskforce on Child Protection. Photographs: Collège du Léman and Ecolint via R2.