Is Homeschooling Legal in Mexico and Latin America?

Rogelio Valdés

May 4, 2021

Enroll in our Elementary and Middle School at robinacademy.com/escuela

The information I’m sharing here is part of our broader guide to understanding alternative education and the world of homeschooling. You can find more material on this topic on our blog at robinacademy.com/blog and on our YouTube channel.

One of the biggest questions families ask when they start exploring alternative education and homeschooling is whether all of this is actually legal. We are talking about our children’s education, and the last thing we want is to hurt their future. On the contrary, we want to open more doors and give them even better opportunities. So let me explain how this works and how families can approach it correctly.

I will focus mainly on Mexico, but much of what I say also applies to many countries across Latin America and to Spain. For the Mexican Education Ministry, there are three main ways to accredit elementary and middle school studies:

1. Attend a public or private school

This is the method most of us know best, and probably the same system through which we were educated. Some schools are public, subsidized, and run by the government, while others are private. Both must follow the standards set by the Education Ministry in terms of infrastructure and academic curriculum. Schools can add more content, but they cannot change the order in which students see the official topics. The same math topics my parents studied are probably the ones I studied too, in almost exactly the same order.

2. Attend a foreign school

What happens when students need to move to another country for a few years because of their parents’ work? Or when a Korean family, for example, moves to Mexico and wants their children’s studies to remain valid?

Long ago, countries realized they needed agreements so that official documents issued in one country could be legally recognized in another. That led to the Hague Apostille Convention in 1961. This agreement states that documents issued in one country can have legal validity in another as long as they go through the apostille process. What is an apostille? It is essentially a certification seal that guarantees to the international community that your document is legally valid and can be used across borders.

As you can imagine, this applies to many official documents, including academic certificates. That is how students who study in another country can apostille an elementary, middle school, or grade-level certificate and make it valid in another place to continue their studies.

So how does that help if you do not live abroad? In countries like the United States, there are umbrella schools, institutions regulated by the state department of education in their region, and many of them can serve remote students. Some umbrella schools follow their own curriculum, while others allow families to choose and build the curriculum based on their children’s needs. This is one of the main ways homeschooling studies are validated in Mexico and in many other countries.

A family homeschooling in Mexico can register with one of these umbrella schools so that the student’s studies are officially validated. In that case, the student would receive international certification from a school in Texas, for example, and that certification could be made valid in other countries by apostilling the documents. This can often be handled by mail and is usually not very expensive.

3. Take the INEA exam

In Mexico, it is also legal to certify studies through the INEA exam, from the National Institute for Adult Education.

Here, the process involves going to the closest INEA office and taking an exam to demonstrate that your children have the knowledge required for their school level. This option works for elementary and middle school. For high school, there are other alternatives such as CENEVAL or online open-prep programs.

Which option is better?

At Robin, we designed a new educational methodology for elementary and middle school. As I’ve mentioned before, we are built around small groups, in-person or guided experiences led by a mentor, and a curriculum designed specifically to provide the skills children will actually need in the years ahead. We want students to explore topics that interest them and develop personal projects so they can begin discovering their own passions.

Because our program is flexible and uses a curriculum that adapts to each child, we chose to provide elementary and middle school certification through West River Academy, an umbrella school with more than 25 years of experience supporting children around the world and certifying their studies internationally. In that sense, we follow the second option I described above, but we also offer the possibility of certification through INEA.

That means a student who completes elementary school in our program can continue studying in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Europe, the United States, and the more than 100 countries that are part of the Hague Convention.

If you want to learn more about our program, I invite you to register for our summer camp, which is designed as a small-group experience using the methodology we began implementing from the August 2021 school cycle onward. You can sign up at robinacademy.com/escuela.

Enroll in our Elementary and Middle School at robinacademy.com/escuela