Since the 1980s the field of international education in Portugal, characterised by a long tradition in the context of the formation of the Portuguese national elites (Vieira, 2003), has been changing through the growing influence of international not-for-profit organisations such as the International Baccalaureate ® (IB) and the Cambridge International Examinations (CIE).

Mostly concentrated in the area of Greater Lisbon, private Portuguese schools or British/US schools have introduced these international curricula/diploma and since 2000 some private schools have also been founded which offer exclusively the curricula of IB or CIE.   

Through these international organisations as transnational providers of international education new types of transnational spaces of education are emerging “from above” (Adick, 2005: 262ff.); in the case of Portugal it is the emergence of a new segment of elite education, which thus far has only been analysed in a few isolated empirical studies (Cortesão et al., 2007; Macedo, 2009; Macedo & Araújo 2016; Louçã et al. 2014).

This contribution focuses on the role of the IB in the field of international education in the area of Greater Lisbon, as this international organisation is one of the main actors providing international education in this area. On the one hand, the development of this organisation since its 1968 foundation and its changing educational ambitions will be analysed; on the other, the manifestation of the IB within the field of international schools will be discussed based on a presentation of the results of an analysis of interviews with school directors and administrators and also of school websites in the context of a study on the field of international schools in Greater Lisbon (1). Special attention will be paid to the influence of the IB in relation to educational concepts as elements of school identity.

From a theoretical perspective, the project refers to the concept of organisational/institutional identity, in particular school identity, which is understood as a heuristic category (e.g., Draelants & Dumay, 2011). The study also gains impetus from transnationalisation research, which up to now has rarely been applied to school research (Keßler et al., 2015). One example is the concept of transnational spaces of education (Adick, 2005; Hayden, 2011), which represents another theoretical reference for the study.

In general, the study aims at generating new insights into the changing identity of international schools in Portugal through the growing influence of international organisations and also opens up comparative perspectives regarding the role of these transnational providers of international education in other national and local contexts.  

(1) The contribution is based on a research project entitled “The internationalisation of the elite formation in Portugal. A qualitative study on international schools in Greater Lisbon” (CIES-IUL, Lisbon; Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg) and funded by the Foundation of Science and Technology (FCT).

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