​KIS scores 100% through OPEC quality assessment

By Mrs. Kumaree Komarakul Na Nagara

On September 10, 2015, KIS welcomed three visitors representing the Office of the Private Education Commission (OPEC), Ministry of Education, on a one-day visit to assess the quality of the school in all areas including strategic and action planning, curriculum development, student learning, student life, use of ICT for educational and administrative purposes, human resources and financial management, governance, and quality assurance and accreditation systems.

As a result of the visit, KIS scored 100% meeting all the standards and criteria of the Ministry of Education, set forth to assess the quality of international schools in Thailand. The visitors commended the school on the followings:

• KIS is a professional teaching-learning community where the focus is the best interest of students.
• The implementation of the IB curriculum and best practices such as Visible Learning at KIS is of high quality.
• The use of ICT at KIS, in particular Managebac, which integrates and responds to the needs of the IB programme and other areas of school administration, is efficient and effective.
• The vision of the KIS Governance strives towards educational excellence through providing continuous staff development; and programmes that assist students to reach their potential in accordance to the IB Learner Profile.
• KIS Management and the KIS school culture encourages participation from all school constituencies at all levels in effort to continuously improve all areas of the school.

The visit was part of the OPEC regulations, which requires that all private schools undergo an ‘Internal Quality Assurance (IQA)’ process which includes the setting up of an IQA committee within schools whose role is to assess the quality of the school’s performance over the previous academic year, outline the development goals for the following year, and provide OPEC with an annual IQA report that is shared with the community as appropriate. As part of this process, OPEC will send a three person IQA assessment team to visit international schools, once every three years.

The last OPEC IQA visit to KIS was in November 2012, which was the same period that KIS was undergoing the joint CIS & ONESQA visit.