Lycée Victor Hugo - École française de Florence

It runs the network of French schools worldwide, while the accreditation itself, the homologation, is granted by the French education ministry and inspected by French state inspectors. A leaver from a homologated school moves into a school in France without an entrance examination. Homologation is granted stage by stage, so it sometimes covers only part of the year groups.

What the badge means for this school. The school has been through this organisation's accreditation. It was judged as a whole: governance, safeguarding, staff, premises, teaching. The entry stands in the organisation's public register - anyone can check it.

The state programme of France. A school is homologated by the French ministry of education, and a leaver may move into a school in France without entrance tests. Homologation is granted stage by stage, so it sometimes covers only part of the year groups.

What this means for this school. Which year groups of this school are covered by homologation - only the primary ones, or all the way to the final year - is not stated here. The difference matters: it decides whether the school takes a child through to the French baccalaureate or hands them on to another school halfway.

The state school programme of the country the school stands in: it is set by that country's ministry of education, which also licenses the school and awards the leaving certificate. That certificate is used for entry to local universities, and abroad it is matched to the local one.

What this means for this school. This entry does not count towards the score, and that is deliberate. Every lawful school in a country works to the national programme, so on its own it tells one school apart from no other - unlike the French, German or Russian programmes, which are carried abroad and confirmed by the register of their organisation. We show it because a parent needs to know what programme their child is taught and what certificate the child will get. Counting it would lift the whole ranking at once and still tell nobody apart.

Mission laïque française (MLF) is a French non-profit association founded in 1902; its school network is called Réseau mlfmonde. The network gives different figures on its own pages - 108 schools in 38 countries on some, 107 schools in 37 countries on another, with more than 61,000 students in both cases - and we quote both. In Spain the network lists 10 lycées, in Alicante, Murcia, Palma, Reus, Seville, Telde (Gran Canaria), Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Valladolid, Villanueva de la Cañada (Madrid) and Zaragoza. In a notice dated 21 September 2026, MLF writes that since 1 September 2026 the day-to-day management of its Spanish schools has been entrusted to the association AFLEC-GEE under a management mandate, refers to 9 schools, and says the legal transfer of each will be completed by 31 July 2028 at the latest. The notice does not say which of the ten schools is not among the nine. The network's site is mlfmonde.org.

What this means for this school. The network owns or operates the school. Its accreditation and programme authorisation the school obtains separately, in its own name.