In short. The Boardingly Worldly ranking is an objective, out-of-100 score built entirely from public, verifiable signals — never from a school paying us, and never from opinion. It sits alongside our subjective Boardingly scorecard, not instead of it. Right now it is provisional, on purpose: two of its eight categories are new and still filling with data, so today’s numbers will move, and a handful of famous names read lower than reputation would suggest. We would rather show you an honest, incomplete picture than a flattering, invented one.
Every school profile on Boardingly carries two different scores, and they answer two different questions. The Boardingly scorecard, out of ten in eight categories, is our editorial judgement — how accessible a school is to an international family, how friendly, how strong its entry requirements are. It is informed opinion, and we say so.
The Worldly ranking, out of 100, is not opinion. It is a composite built from eight categories of publicly sourced signal, each weighted, each traceable back to where the number came from. No school can buy a higher Worldly score, request a re-score, or see the methodology change because they asked. That is the whole point of it.
The eight categories, and what each one actually measures
| Category | What it measures | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Brains Trust | Academic results — A-level and IB outcomes, inspection grades | 25% |
| Forward Thinking | Breadth of forward-looking subjects and activity — STEM, computing, entrepreneurship, sustainability | 15% |
| Alumni Power | The reach and standing of a school’s known former pupils | 15% |
| Bragging Rights | Founding heritage and standing among peer associations | 10% |
| Trophy Cabinet | Recorded academic, sporting and creative awards | 10% |
| In the Public Eye | Press coverage and public visibility, positive and neutral | 10% |
| Parent Views | Aggregated, anonymised parent sentiment from public review sources | 10% |
| Staffroom View | Aggregated, anonymised staff sentiment — never a single review, always about the school as a whole | 5% |
Every signal behind every category is sourced from somewhere we can point to — an ISI or Ofsted report, a published exam results table, a public review site, a press archive. Nothing in the Worldly ranking is generated, estimated from a school’s reputation, or filled in because it “seems about right.”
Why some very well-known schools score lower than expected right now
Two of the eight categories — Forward Thinking and Staffroom View — are new. We introduced them because a school’s readiness to prepare a child for a genuinely global career is about more than exam grades and alumni lists; it is also about whether the curriculum looks forward and whether the people who work there day to day rate the place. But new categories start empty, and an empty category scores zero, not “not applicable.”
That has a real, visible effect: a school with excellent academics and a famous name, but no Forward Thinking or Staffroom View data yet, is currently carrying roughly a fifth of its total weight as zero. Its position relative to other schools is still fair, because every school is measured on the same incomplete basis. But its absolute score reads lower than it will once we finish gathering that data.
We chose to show you this honestly, imperfect number today rather than hide the two new categories until they are full. A scorecard that only shows the flattering categories is not an objective scorecard. We would rather you see a school at 63 out of 100 today, understand why, and watch it rise as real data arrives, than see an artificially rounded number with the gaps quietly smoothed over.
What “provisional” means, concretely
Every Worldly ranking on the site carries a “Provisional” tag and a coverage note. That is not decoration. It means:
- The categories with real data behind them are shown as bars you can inspect individually.
- A category with no data yet simply does not show a bar — but it is still counted as zero in the total, which is why the total and the visible bars can look slightly out of step for now.
- We widen sourcing continuously, and a school’s score is recalculated, never manually adjusted, as new signal arrives.
What it is not
It is not a paid placement. No school features more prominently, scores higher, or gets a second look because of any commercial relationship with Boardingly — we take no fee from any school for anything shown on a profile. It is not a replacement for visiting a school, meeting a housemaster, or trusting your own read of whether your child would be known there. And it is not finished. We are building the most honestly sourced standing measure we can, in public, with the gaps visible rather than papered over — and we will keep telling you, plainly, when that changes.
