Malaysia’s school licence types, explained
Why the counts never agree
Malaysia’s Ministry of Education (KPM) counts licences, not campuses, and registers primary and secondary levels separately in many cases. Its 2025 statistics count 246 international licences. This directory lists campuses — one record per operating campus — which is why our published count (236 international records, 230 of them open) is lower, with the difference reconciled school by school in our changelog: level-split registrations, duplicate name variants, closed and renamed schools, and licences with no findable operating school.
The four categories
- International schools — hold an international licence, teach a foreign curriculum (British, American, IB, Australian and others) in English, and may admit Malaysian and foreign students without a quota. This is the main directory here.
- National-curriculum private schools — private schools teaching the Malaysian national curriculum (KSSR/KSSM) towards SPM. Some run dual-track or bilingual strands. They hold a different licence and are not in this directory’s international section.
- Expatriate schools — a small licence class serving specific national communities (for example the German, French and Japanese schools). They are generally not open to general admission and are not listed in Phase 1 of this directory.
- Chinese independent schools (独中) — community-funded, Mandarin-medium secondary schools teaching the UEC curriculum coordinated by Dong Zong (UCSCAM). They are private schools outside the national examination system (many students also sit SPM as an additional track). We list them in their own section, never mixed with international schools.
What a licence does and does not tell you
A licence tells you which legal category a school operates in — not whether it is good. Accreditation (for example CIS, NEASC, WASC) and examination results are separate signals; where a school publishes them, they appear on its page. A school’s absence from this directory means we could not anchor it to an operating campus and an official website — not that it does not exist.