Mulgrave School

The short version

The short version

Mulgrave School is an independent, not-for-profit, co-educational IB World School founded in 1993, teaching children from age 3 to Grade 12 on a 155,000-square-foot campus in West Vancouver, at the foot of Cypress Mountain.

It runs the complete IB continuum — Primary Years, Middle Years and Diploma Programmes — and every graduate also earns the BC Dogwood diploma, which keeps both the international and the Canadian university doors open.↗↗

For a relocating family, the practical summary is this: Mulgrave is Vancouver’s closest analogue to a classic international school — co-ed, secular, full-continuum IB, globally recruited faculty — in a region whose other top independents are single-sex and AP-based.

Tuition is actually lower than the west-side heritage schools, but the CAD 25,000 refundable family deposit changes the cash-flow maths, and the North Shore location is either a lifestyle upgrade or a bridge commute, depending where you live.

What the school is

A 1993 school built like an international school

Mulgrave was founded in 1993 — young enough that its own leadership brief calls it ‘a young and agile school’ — and it has behaved like one: a purpose-built facility rather than an inherited campus, the Allard Family Senior School added in 2015, and an identity (‘Mulgrave School, the International School of Vancouver’) pitched at globally mobile families rather than inherited tradition.↗↗

The setting is a genuine differentiator: the campus sits in forest above Burrard Inlet beside Cypress Mountain, and outdoor education is structural — overnight camps begin in Grade 3, including at the school’s own Squamish Outdoor Leadership and Education (SOLE) Centre, and are covered by tuition rather than billed as extras.↗

Governance signals are standard for the tier: not-for-profit, CAIS-accredited, and a member of the Council of International Schools and ISABC.

One telling internal policy from the school’s university counselling profile: Mulgrave does not calculate GPA or rank its students — a small detail that says a great deal about the academic culture universities are asked to read.↗↗

Academics in practice

Full-continuum IB, with the Dogwood as a safety net

Mulgrave is a continuum IB World School: PYP from preschool to Grade 5, MYP through Grades 6-10, and the Diploma Programme in Grades 11-12. All students follow the IB curriculum and nearly all take the full DP.

Critically for a family weighing IB against the local system, the school’s Grade 10 program plus the DP satisfies every BC graduation requirement, so students earn the provincial Dogwood diploma in parallel — the international credential with a Canadian fallback built in.↗↗

The school does not publish its IB Diploma results on its public pages — no average score, no pass rate — which is a genuine gap for a school whose entire pitch is the IB.

Ask admissions for the last three years of DP results distributions, not just the highlights, and compare them against the global average the IBO publishes each session.

Where Crofton House and St. George’s offer AP’s cafeteria model, Mulgrave commits every student to the IB’s fixed framework — Extended Essay, Theory of Knowledge, CAS and all.

For a family certain of the IB, that totality is the appeal. For a student who would rather specialize early, it is a constraint worth naming honestly before you apply.

Admissions and cost

Fees, the CAD 25,000 deposit, and the December 1 deadline

For 2026-27, tuition is CAD 30,290 (preschool to Grade 5), CAD 33,370 (Grades 6-10) and CAD 34,180 (Grades 11-12), plus consolidated fees that rise from CAD 690 in the early years to CAD 2,720 at Grade 10 and cover textbooks, technology, yearbooks, field trips, grade camps and local global-experiential trips.

Headline tuition is notably below Crofton House and St. George’s — but read the next paragraph before celebrating.↗

Every new family deposits CAD 25,000 with the school as a non-interest-bearing loan — in effect a bond, funding repayments to departing families, returned in the fall after your last child leaves.

It is refundable, so it is not a fee, but it is real money out of your account for potentially fourteen years, and its opportunity cost at any sensible rate of return belongs in your true-cost comparison against schools charging CAD 5,000-10,000 entrance fees instead.↗

Admissions concentrates on four intakes — preschool, Kindergarten, Grade 7 and Grade 10 — with selection by standardized and small-group assessments plus interviews. For 2027-28 entry, the deadline is December 1, 2026 for Preschool (age 4), Kindergarten and Grades 1-11; the age-3 preschool deadline is February 1, 2027.

From 2027-28, a Preschool Extended Day option adds CAD 4,000 a year, prioritized for households where all adults work.↗↗

Financial assistance is real but gated: personalized tuition plans, partial or full, for new students entering Grades 7-11, need-assessed by a third party, with a January 29, 2027 deadline for the coming cycle.

A separate bursary program cushions current families through temporary hardship for up to three years — a distinction (aid to enter versus aid to stay) worth understanding before you rely on either.↗

The family experience

Why pay at all — Mulgrave against the free public system

West Vancouver’s public schools are among BC’s strongest — the district runs its own public IB Diploma at West Vancouver Secondary — so a resident family faces the sharpest version of the ‘why pay’ question in this guide.

The honest answer: Mulgrave offers the IB from age three rather than age sixteen, class sizes and facilities a public district cannot match, and a genuinely international peer group. If none of those is decisive, the free public system here is not a compromise; it is arguably the default.

Geography is the daily reality check. The campus sits up Cypress Bowl Lane, and for families based in Vancouver proper the commute means the Lions Gate or Ironworkers bridge at rush hour — a real cost measured in hours per week.

Families who choose Mulgrave typically choose the North Shore to live on; visit at 8 a.m. on a school day before deciding which side of that trade you are on.

Parent sentiment in public forums tends to praise the campus, the outdoor program and the IB teaching, with recurring notes about the deposit’s cash-flow sting and the bridge commute. Treat it as reported experience.

On your visit, probe how the school integrates the large Grade 7 intake and what the DP workload looks like in practice for a student joining from a non-IB system.

Take these to the school

Questions that move beyond the tour script