Shanghai schools for expat kids: the honest map

Shanghai gives an expat family five kinds of school: foreign-passport international schools, private bilingual schools, public-school international divisions, local public schools, and the Shanghai Taiwanese Children's School (上海台商子女学校). Which of them your child can attend is set first by passport and residence, then by curriculum, and only then by which specific school and where it sits. This guide maps all five — who each admits, what they teach, and how the pieces fit — so you can see the whole field before you tour a single campus.

The five kinds of school, and who each admits

The five are not variants of one thing; they sit under different rules.

The Shanghai government's own guide to enrolling a child in a Shanghai school points expat parents to the first four routes; the Shanghai Taiwanese Children's School sits in a separate category under the cross-strait framework.

Which schools can your child actually attend?

Eligibility is the first filter, and there is one rule underneath it all. Under China's founding regulation for these schools (MOE 1995 Interim Measures, Article 8, still in force — verified July 2026):

Plainly: a foreign-passport international school may enrol only children of foreign personnel who legally reside in China, and may not enrol children of Chinese citizens. A private bilingual school, by contrast, admits both.

There is a documented exception. Where both parents hold Chinese passports but the child has two or more continuous years of study overseas and foreign permanent residency, the family can apply to the Shanghai education commission for a waiver letter (教委豁免函); a child holding that letter becomes eligible for a foreign-passport school (this is the case each school labels — Shanghai American School's Category 4, Wellington's Type D). The application runs through the Shanghai one-stop government service. As with any admissions policy, confirm the current criteria with the school and the education commission before you rely on them.

So a Chinese passport does not automatically rule out every foreign-passport school: the default is no, the waiver path covers the overseas-study-plus-permanent-residency case, and the private bilingual route is always open.

One practical note: there is no standardised admissions system across these schools. Each school defines its own eligibility categories and its own document list — Shanghai American School calls them Category 1–4, Wellington Type A–F, SCIS Type A/B/C — all applying the same government rule. Shortlist the schools you are interested in first, then check each one's own admissions page for its exact conditions and required documents.

What curriculum will they follow — and where does it lead?

Curriculum matters more than the school's name, because it decides which universities are the natural next step. Four systems run in Shanghai:

• IB (International Baccalaureate). The Diploma (DP) is the final exit — broad, six-subject, recognised worldwide. SCIS, YCIS and WISS run it as their main programme; Dulwich, Wellington and Nord Anglia also finish with the IB Diploma.
• British. The English National Curriculum runs to IGCSE at 16, then either A-Levels or the IB Diploma. A "British school" is not automatically an "A-Level school": Harrow and Britannica finish with A-Levels; Dulwich, Wellington and Nord Anglia finish with the IB Diploma. Check which qualification the school finishes with at 18, not just the name.
• American. US curriculum to Advanced Placement (AP), plus SAT/ACT — the natural fit for US-university-bound families. Shanghai American School, Concordia, Livingston and SMIC's international division run this.
• National systems. The German School Shanghai teaches to the Abitur (Germany's university-entrance qualification), the Lycée Français to the Baccalauréat (France's), and the Japanese and Korean schools to their own home examinations. These fit families who will keep going in that home system.

What about the Japanese, Korean, German and French schools?

Shanghai has full national-curriculum schools for Japanese (Shanghai Japanese School, 上海日本人学校), Korean (Shanghai Korean School, 上海韩国学校), German (German School Shanghai, to the Abitur) and French (Lycée Français de Shanghai, to the Baccalauréat) families — all on the official government list. They teach a home-country curriculum in the home language, which makes them the right answer for a family posted here for a few years who wants continuity with home and a clean re-entry later.

There is no standalone Australian, Canadian, Dutch or Scandinavian school in Shanghai; those nationalities are served by language or curriculum streams inside other international schools, not by separate schools.

How many schools are there?

The Shanghai government's official list of international schools, dated August 2025, names 32 foreign-passport schools. Add the private bilingual schools, the public-school international divisions and the national schools, and the real field a family chooses from runs well beyond the dozen names that come up first in conversation.

What do they cost?

Tuition climbs with grade level everywhere — each stage costs more than the last, and the bills grow fastest through middle and high school — while the type of school sets the bracket. These ranges come from each school's own published fee schedule (mostly 2026–27; a few schools have only posted 2025–26 so far):

Three practical notes. First, a useful rule of thumb: at the licensed foreign-passport schools, tuition for a school-age child (Grade 1 up) starts around ¥210,000 — the figures you see below ¥200,000 in this category are early-years tiers (nursery to kindergarten). Second, tuition is not the whole bill: schools also charge an application fee (¥2,500–3,800 at the major names), a refundable deposit or resource fee (¥15,000–25,000), often one-off non-refundable enrolment or capital fees (¥15,000–25,000; SAS's add up to ¥60,000 for a new student), plus bus, lunch, uniform and exam fees — so budget from roughly ¥250,000 per child per year at a major international school before extras. Third, the national schools are the striking exception — the Japanese School's elementary tuition is roughly a tenth of what the major English-medium international schools charge — which is a large part of why families who can use their home-country school usually do. A full per-school cost breakdown is coming as its own guide in this series.

How to actually choose

Eligibility comes first because it is not yours to negotiate — the passport and residence rules above decide what is even possible, and they remove options before anything else. After that, work in this order:

1. Start with the child. Personality, learning style, languages already spoken, any special-educational or pastoral needs, and where they are in their schooling. This is the foundation, not an afterthought.
2. Derive the curriculum from the child. A child likely to sit UK university entrance, a child aiming at the US, a child who should stay in their home-country system, a child who thrives in a broad IB versus a focused A-Level path — the right system falls out of who the child is and where they're heading.
3. Then the school. Which schools that are open to you teach that curriculum well, with the right pastoral style and class size.
4. Location last. Once the school is chosen, the neighbourhood follows from its campus and bus network — not the other way around. See which Shanghai neighbourhoods expat families actually cluster in, and why school choice comes before the apartment.

When you don't need help

If your family has one clear nationality, a settled view on curriculum, and a budget that fits, the eligible shortlist is short and you can walk it yourself. A second pair of eyes earns its keep in the harder cases: a mixed-nationality or returning-overseas-Chinese family working the eligibility rules, a child with a specific learning need, a mid-year move, or a "we have three offers — which one" decision.

More in this series (coming soon): the real cost of Shanghai school fees; who can attend which school, in full; the Japanese, Korean and Euro schools; international vs bilingual vs public division; and IB vs A-Level vs AP in Shanghai. Each will be linked here as it goes live.

Sources & last verified (July 2026):

• Eligibility rule — MOE 1995 Interim Measures, Art. 8: moe.gov.cn
• School types & enrolment routes — Shanghai municipal government enrolment guide: english.shanghai.gov.cn
• School count (32, dated Aug 2025) — Shanghai government international-schools list: english.shanghai.gov.cn
• Waiver-letter (教委豁免函) path — Shanghai one-stop government service: zwdt.sh.gov.cn
• Tuition figures — each named school's own published fee schedule for the year stated (e.g. saschina.org, shanghai.wellingtoncollege.cn, ds-shanghai.de), collected July 2026
• Per-school curricula, exit routes and categories are confirmed against each school's own official site in our internal fact record before they appear here. Re-verified yearly.