Profiling British Columbia Offshore Schools in 2025/26: A Longitudinal Comparative Analysis of Inspection Reports

British Columbia (BC) offshore schools deliver the BC provincial curriculum in international contexts under the oversight of the BC Ministry of Education and Child Care. While a recent thematic content analysis of 2024 inspection reports established baseline characteristics for the program (Marković & López-Carratalá, 2025), no longitudinal evidence has been available to determine whether structural patterns are stable, intensifying, or shifting over time. This study aims to examine year-over-year change across the BC offshore school network by replicating the 2024 coding framework on the 2025/26 cohort of inspection reports.

The study employed a qualitative content analysis of 34 inspection reports released by the BC Ministry of Education and Child Care during the 2025/26 inspection cycle. Reports were coded against the same predefined subthemes used by Marković and López-Carratalá (2025) — School ID, Country/Region, Total Enrolment, Grade Levels, Curriculum Implementation, Governance Structure, Staffing and Teacher Certification, Operational Challenges, Enrolment Trends, and Other Key Observations. The 2025/26 results were then systematically compared to the 2024 dataset to identify directional change.

The 2025/26 cohort contains three fewer schools in China (n = 20, down from 23) and the appearance of Colombia as a new host country, while all other countries from the 2024 cohort remain represented. China's aggregate BC program enrolment declined from 2,867 to 2,542 students, and the largest individual China school decreased from 347 to 296 students. China's full compliance rate held essentially steady (80%, n = 16/20). Operator concentration intensified: three operator groups now control 70% of China's BC offshore schools, up from "more than half" in 2024. Reliance on Letters of Exemption remains widespread (68% of all schools, n = 23/34), and turnover continues to disrupt instructional continuity in some sites while other sites report substantial workforce stability. Outside China, the larger-scale schools in the Gulf and Egypt continued growing, while curriculum-engagement features such as project-based and inquiry-based learning were reported nearly twice as often in non-China schools as in China schools.

The 2025/26 inspection cycle indicates that the BC offshore school program in China is contracting in absolute size while consolidating in ownership, even as compliance rates remain stable. The two regional cohorts — China and the rest of the network — are diverging rather than converging in scale, governance form, and curricular emphasis. The persistence of the Letters of Exemption pattern across two consecutive years confirms that teacher certification remains the program's most durable structural challenge. Recommendations for the BC Ministry of Education and Child Care include re-examining the certification pipeline, monitoring operator concentration as a quality assurance variable, and providing differentiated support for the small Chinese schools that now operate near minimum viable enrolment thresholds.

International Education

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