Belgrade schools for Russian-speaking families

The two schools that teach in Russian, what the English-medium schools do with a child who has no English, the state-school route, and the one school whose fees are published only in Russian.

Updated September 2026 · schools' own pages read 24 August 2026

The two schools that teach in Russian

Both schools follow the Russian federal state standards (FGOS) and both run the Russian ladder rather than a Serbian or British one, so a child who joins either can move back into a school in Russia, or on to the next Russian school abroad, without a change of system. Beyond that they have little in common.

The General Education School at the Embassy of Russia is not a private school. It is a structural subdivision of the Embassy, founded by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in Novi Beograd. It runs the full eleven-year Russian ladder — four years of primary, five of basic, two of upper secondary — to a Russian state certificate, and it charges no tuition. Its own site quotes the law it works under: the children of embassy, trade-mission, military-mission and other posted federal staff are admitted as of right, and other children may also be admitted free of charge by decision of the head of the school, agreed with the ministry in Moscow, with Russian citizens given preference. The school publishes the text of that law rather than an admissions procedure of its own, and gives two telephone numbers for enquiries. There is no fee to publish, because there is none.

Prva ruska međunarodna škola „Valentina Tereškova“ is a private school in Senjak teaching ages 6 to 17 in Russian, with English from the second grade and Serbian available at an enhanced level. It cites a numbered Serbian Ministry of Education decision for its recognition. It publishes no fees and no admissions procedure: its enrolment page asks families to request an interview about the child's admission and says that fuller detail will follow. Ask for the fee schedule and the exclusions in writing before that interview.

An English-medium school with no English

Twelve of the nineteen schools in this guide teach entirely in English and three more teach partly in it, and a child who does not speak it is a normal arrival at most of them, not an exception. What differs — and what almost none of them publish — is how much English-language support is inside the fee and what happens when a child needs more. The table is everything the schools themselves say; where a cell reads “not published” that is the finding, not a gap in our reading.

From each school's own published admissions and support pages, read 24 August 2026. The language page has the three questions worth asking every school in writing.

One school deserves a separate sentence for a Russian-speaking reader. London Gates Belgrade, a Cambridge primary school in Stari Grad, publishes its fee schedule on its Russian-language primary-school page, under «Тарифы», and nowhere in English — on the day we read it, the English site's own link to that page returned an error. It also runs a Russian weekend school for ages 5 to 9 and an English weekend school for ages 4 to 15 alongside the full-time primary school; those are enrolled separately. The full-time school ends at 11, so a child who joins it will change school again.

The state school, and Serbian for the child

A Serbian state school is the route most families from abroad never consider, and for a family that intends to stay it is the one where a child actually acquires Serbian. Article 23 of the Law on the Foundations of the Education System enrols a foreign national on the same conditions as a Serbian citizen and obliges the school to organise Serbian-language instruction for a child who does not speak it. Two qualifications matter. Those lessons are free only under reciprocity between states and otherwise at the parent's expense; and a certificate from a Russian school needs recognition when the child moves into the Serbian system — not while they stay in an international school and not when they later apply abroad. The Government's own page states that a pupil who has applied for recognition can be conditionally enrolled in the next grade if the procedure is not finished by the start of the year.

For a child who is staying in an international school but should not lose the language of the country, nine providers in Belgrade publish that they teach Serbian as a foreign language to children, and three of the international schools run it themselves.

Questions families ask