Your child is on the British programme. You move to Brazil, where ten schools teach it

How it turned out this way

Two neighbouring countries took different routes, and they took them long ago.

Argentina followed the British. Of the 209 international schools in the country, 128 teach the British programme. The International Baccalaureate, the IB, is taught by 56.

Brazil did the opposite. Of 198 schools, 96 teach the IB. Ten teach the British programme.

For an adult that is two lines in a directory. For a child it means different textbooks, different exams and a different school year.

The British programme takes a child to IGCSE at sixteen. Then comes A-Level, and with it university in England. The IB works differently: a primary stage from age three, a middle stage from eleven, a final stage from sixteen, and that final stage is accepted almost everywhere.

You can move a child from one to the other. But that is not changing schools. That is starting again.

Here are all ten

If you are moving from Argentina to Brazil and want your child to finish the British programme, this is the list you choose from.

That is it. The list is over.

If work takes you to Salvador, there is no British school at all. The city has 12 international schools. Curitiba and Florianópolis are empty too.

And if you are going the other way

There is more room here. But only in one place.

56 schools in Argentina teach the IB. Forty-one of them are in Buenos Aires.

That leaves fifteen for the rest of the country. Three in Córdoba, two in Mendoza, and one each in Río Cuarto, Rosario, Mar del Plata, Salta, Tucumán, Corrientes and a few other towns.

One school in a city is not a choice. It is a lottery, and you are already in it, because the move is decided.

The youngest children have it hardest

There is a catch here, and families find it late.

Of the 56 Argentine schools with the IB, forty-eight teach only the final stage, the one that starts at sixteen. The earlier stages exist at eight schools in the entire country. And not one school offers the full run, from three years old to graduation under one roof.

In Brazil fifteen schools offer the full run.

So if your child is seven and you are thinking «we’ll put them in the IB and let them grow up in one system», Argentina will not give you that. Brazil will.

Schools that teach both

Some schools run the British line and the IB side by side. For a family that will move again, this is the best thing you can find: the child finishes what was started and picks up a second qualification for later.

Argentina has 22 of them. Seventeen are in Buenos Aires.

Brazil has seven. Four in São Paulo, one each in Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, Niterói.

Count that again: Buenos Aires alone has more schools teaching both than the whole of Brazil.

About money, briefly

A year at an Argentine school costs about $10 655 in the middle of the range. At a Brazilian one, about $17 525.

Do not lean on those numbers. In Argentina alone the cheapest school asks $2 462 a year and the dearest $40 000. The spread inside one country is wider than the gap between the two.

«Brazil is more expensive» is a poor guide. Look at the city and the school.

What to do once the move is decided

Check your city first, not the country. A school with the right programme can exist in the country and not exist where you are going to live.

Then look at how far that school takes the programme. The British line often stops at sixteen: in Argentina 41 schools out of 128 go on to A-Level. The school itself keeps going, it simply moves the child onto the Argentine state programme after sixteen and graduates them with a local certificate. That is a normal route. It is better to know about it now than on your child’s sixteenth birthday.

And if you know you will move on in a few years, look for a school that teaches both. There are not many, nearly all of them are in capital cities, and they are what makes the next move less expensive.