Is an Online Islamic School Accredited, and Does It Matter?

What the word is doing on those pages

Accredited is a strong word. It suggests an outside body has inspected the teaching and stands behind it. For a full-time online school teaching a national curriculum, that is exactly what it should mean, and it is worth paying for.

On a page selling three Quran lessons a week, the word is doing a different job. It is there because parents are nervous about buying education from a website, and the word settles them.

How to check a claim in two minutes

• Find the name of the accrediting body. No name means no accreditation.
• Search that name on its own. A real body has its own website and a list of the schools it accredits.
• Check your school is on that list, not just mentioned on their own page.
• Check what it accredits. A body that accredits online course providers is not a schools inspectorate.

When it genuinely matters

• You are homeschooling and the qualification has to be recognised later.
• Your child will move to another school and needs their year to count.
• You are in a country where home education must be registered against an approved provider.

If none of those are true for you, accreditation is not the thing to shop on. The teacher is.

Where we stand

We are not an accredited school and we do not say we are. We teach Quran reading, Tajweed, Hifz and Islamic Studies to children after school, one to one. We do not issue a school certificate, and we do not run an Ijazah programme.

We say this plainly because a parent who needs an accredited school should go and find one, not discover after three months that they bought something else.

Related