Miras International School

In Brief

Miras is the right school if IB continuity from age three through to the Diploma matters, and you want that in a school where your child will be in genuine multilingual company rather than a mostly Kazakhstani cohort. The fees are lower than KIS and the campus larger, but the administration is worth probing before you commit.

Miras is, technically, the most historically significant IB school in Almaty. Opened in 1999 under the Nazarbayev Educational Foundation, it was Kazakhstan's first school authorised for all three IB programmes - PYP, MYP, and Diploma - and one of only 272 schools in the world to hold all three. That status gives graduates direct university entry without entrance exams at most leading institutions. The 546-student campus at 190 Al-Farabi Avenue in the Bostandyk district runs three languages of instruction - Kazakh, English, and Russian - from nursery through secondary, with 20 overseas teachers out of 109 faculty total.

The school holds CIS and NEASC accreditation alongside full IB authorisation. Families who have been through MYP and PYP elsewhere will find the curriculum familiar. There is a swimming pool, football field, two gyms, climbing wall, music school, and greenhouse on campus. Fees are structured by stream: the English-taught stream runs from KZT 6.2M at primary to KZT 8.7M for the IB Diploma, with a KZT 400K entrance fee payable once. Full-year payment earns a five percent discount.

Eighteen nationalities are represented in the student body, which makes it meaningfully diverse for Almaty. However, the majority of students are Kazakhstani, and families have raised questions about administration consistency and last-minute decision-making in some years. The school changed its secondary principal recently. Worth asking who is running day-to-day operations and what the current teacher retention looks like before you make a commitment.