Is there a Montessori school in Belgrade?

No. Two kindergartens teach the method, one of them alongside three others, and nothing in the city continues it as a school.

Updated September 2026 · schools' own pages read 1 and 8 September 2026

The two that name it

Montessori in this city is a kindergarten proposition. Both settings that name it are preschools, both are registered as such, and neither appears anywhere in the school half of this guide.

Stepping Stone is the only institution we track that teaches the Montessori method and nothing else. It runs three stages – toddlers from a year and a half to three, a main group from three to six, and a school group from six to nine – at two addresses on opposite sides of the river, in Vračar and Novi Beograd. It publishes a rate for each of the three stages, which most of this city does not. Teaching is in Russian, English and Serbian.

Srpsko-francuski vrtić Guliver in Banovo brdo takes babies from eight months and runs to seven, and it is the only kindergarten in this guide that pairs Serbian with French rather than English. It describes its pedagogy as a blend of Montessori, Waldorf, Reggio Emilia and NTC. Four named approaches at once is a claim worth reading carefully: the site does not describe how they combine, or how much of the day is actually Montessori, and it publishes no prices and no opening hours.

That is the whole of it. Everything else in Belgrade that uses the word does so as a marketing adjective rather than a programme.

What happens at six

This is the question the method actually raises in Belgrade, and no school in the city answers it.

Stepping Stone's six-to-nine group is the only Montessori provision here that goes beyond preschool, and we could not establish from its own site whether that group is a registered school, under what programme it teaches, or whether it is entered in the Serbian register of preschool institutions. We have written that down as unverified rather than assumed it either way. A family relying on it for primary education should ask for the registration in writing before committing, and ask what happens at nine.

After that there is nothing. A Montessori child in Belgrade changes system at six, seven or nine, depending on how long the family stretches it, and the change is to a conventional graded programme in every case.

What Montessori families choose instead

Families who come to us having started in Montessori tend to be looking for the same things: a child who is used to choosing their own work, mixed-age groups, and no early emphasis on marks. Nothing in Belgrade reproduces that. These come closest, for different reasons, and all of them are covered in this guide.

• The IB Primary Years Programme is the nearest mainstream route, because it is inquiry-led and does not grade the early years the way a national programme does. Two schools run it: the International School of Belgrade from three, and Ruđer Bošković from five. It is not Montessori and no one should sell it as such, but the daily texture of a PYP classroom is the closest thing on offer.
• EDUCA International School is built on Finnish pedagogy and runs from three to fourteen, which makes it the only non-IB school here with an explicitly child-led philosophy and a long enough ladder to be worth moving to once.
• Two more kindergartens sit in the same family of ideas without using the word: BeSmart, which names a Finnish approach with STEAM and Reggio Emilia, and Futurino, which follows the Finnish HEI Toolkit curriculum. Both are preschools, so both leave the same question open at six.

What we could not check

Two things we checked and could not confirm, stated here because leaving them out would make the page look more certain than it is.

We found no register of Montessori settings in Serbia and no accreditation claim on either of the two sites. The word is not protected the way "IB World School" or "Cambridge International School" are, and neither of the awarding-body registers this guide normally checks against covers it. There is therefore nothing to verify a Montessori claim against in this country except what the setting itself does, which is why the paragraphs above say what each site says rather than what each setting is.

Several Serbian-language nurseries in Belgrade carry Montessori in their name or their marketing, including one called Moj Montessori. We looked at them while compiling the kindergarten dataset and left them out of it, because their own sites offer a foreign language as an added activity rather than teaching in one, which puts them outside the scope of this guide. That is a statement about our scope, not about their teaching.

Outside Belgrade there is nothing either: none of the five international schools elsewhere in Serbia teaches Montessori.

Questions families ask