The Indian curriculum schools
Bahrain's population was 1,588,670 in 2024: 739,736 Bahrainis and 848,934 non-Bahrainis,
so non-nationals are the majority at 53.4 per cent. The Indian community is roughly
350,000, the largest expatriate group and about 30 per cent of the country, which makes
the Indian curriculum school system unusually large for a country this size.
The Indian School, Bahrain was founded in 1950, is affiliated to CBSE and runs campuses at
Isa Town and Riffa; its own profile page reports over 11,683 students and a workforce of
600. The Asian School is a private, secular, co-educational CBSE school approved by
Bahrain's Ministry of Education, as is Bhavan's Bahrain Indian School. Students at all
three sit the AISSE at Class 10 and the AISSCE at Class 12, papers set by CBSE in India,
which is the content our teachers already work to.
The British, American and IB schools
The other boards genuinely sat here are Cambridge and Pearson Edexcel IGCSE and A Level,
the IB Diploma, the Bahrain Ministry of Education certificates including the General
Intermediate and Religious Intermediate, and the American high school diploma. St
Christopher's School, established 1961, offers IGCSE, A Levels, BTEC and the IB Diploma
and is rated Outstanding by British Schools Overseas. Ibn Khuldoon National School in Isa
Town, established 1983, runs an American curriculum with an IB option, and the British
School of Bahrain runs the British curriculum.
Bahrain School is a local oddity worth knowing about: operated by the Bahrain
International School Association with the United States Department of Defense Education
Activity, kindergarten to Grade 12, with graduating seniors taking either an American
diploma or the IB Diploma.
Bahrain Polytechnic, and the 70 per cent that decides things
Bahrain Polytechnic runs an MSc in Artificial Intelligence at National Qualifications
Framework Level 9, worth 180 NQF credits, first intake October 2024, positioned for
computer science and ICT graduates, engineering and applied science graduates, and
technically literate graduates from other domains. Its School of ICT offers bachelor's
programmes in Programming, Networking, Cybersecurity and Database Systems.
The undergraduate requirements are the ones to read years in advance: a secondary school
completion certificate with Semester 1 to 6 transcripts, a minimum 70 per cent cumulative
grade point average across the final secondary period, evidence of good conduct less than
one year old, and a medical examination from a government health centre. Applicants from
Bahraini private schools also supply an equivalence letter from the Ministry of Education's
Private Education Directorate; the recognised systems include the Indian one, and the 70
per cent applies across all of them.
Read that in order. It is a grade average first, and a grade average is built in Class 9
and 10, not in the term before an application. That is why our teens track puts the
mathematics inside the machine learning.
The rest of the local map
The University of Bahrain's College of Information Technology is the national university's
computing school and the default for state school and CBSE students who stay. Its
postgraduate provision includes an MSc in Machine Learning and Computational Intelligence,
alongside MSc programmes in Information Technology, Cybersecurity and Software
Engineering. The American University of Bahrain offers a BSc in Data Science and
Artificial Intelligence through its College of Engineering and Computing, covering
programming, algorithms, statistics, machine learning, deep learning and big data
analytics, which is the most direct undergraduate AI degree in the country. Also in the
set are the University of Technology Bahrain, Ahlia University, RCSI Bahrain and the
Bahrain Institute of Banking and Finance.
