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Beyond International School

Barcarena, Portugal · est. 2025 · Private

Illustration · Barcarena

Beyond International School stands in Barcarena, in the Oeiras district outside Lisbon, on Rua Soeiro Pereira Gomes. The school is young: it took its first pupils in the 2025-2026 academic year, having finished building shortly before. Teaching follows the Cambridge curriculum: Early Years 3 and Early Years 4 for three- and four-year-olds, Reception from five, Cambridge Primary from Year 1 to Year 5, Cambridge Lower Secondary in Year 6 and Year 7. The school says it will open further year groups step by step, up to Year 12. Lessons run in two languages: every classroom has two teachers, one Portuguese-speaking and one English-speaking, who teach together, and the school states outright that its education is bilingual - Portuguese and English in the same classroom and throughout the day, in projects, play, discussion and ordinary school routines, not by translation and not by memorisation. The Portuguese national curriculum is built into the Cambridge one so that pupils keep their local language and culture while English gives them the global part. A distinctive feature is the daily Be Hour, which the school calls its own invention and the first in the world: the hour is given to the pupil working out how they learn, judging their own progress and setting goals; the same hour carries work on metacognition, collaboration, attention to one's own feelings, financial literacy, creativity and digital literacy. The curriculum is built on a four-dimensional model - knowledge, skills, character and meta-learning - together with the organisation Beyond Education, which prepares the school's leaders and teachers, provides its assessment and reporting platform and gives learners aged 12 and above access to its BE Leader, BE an Entrepreneur and BE a Global Citizen programmes. The site sits in the middle of nature: a farm with animals, a vegetable garden, a lake, sports areas, covered spaces and bright, spacious classrooms; the garden and the farm serve as places of lessons - pupils count seeds, measure plant growth, compare shapes and sizes and work out watering intervals. The school is open from 8:00 to 18:00, lessons run from 8:30 to 16:30 and after-school activities from 17:00 to 18:00. Pupils are fed three times - a morning snack, lunch and an afternoon snack - with fish, meat and vegetarian choices, and at any moment a pupil may take a piece of fruit or a plain snack. The academic year runs from 1 September to 30 June.