According to the ongoing cognitive development and internationalization of education, the intense competition between schools, and the increasing demand for them, due to the clear set of values they provide that depend on distinctive characteristics that give the school a competitive advantage. The purpose of the current study was to explore the priorities of designing a brand model for private schools in Iraq. Therefore, it seeks to achieve several goals, the most important of which is the possibility of building and designing a brand model for private schools in Iraq. The study population consists of founders and leaders of private schools in the Baghdad Governorate, as well as faculty members from the study site. Structured interviews were conducted with 20 experts, who are 2 founders, 10 school leaders, 4 faculty members, and 4 retired teachers with experience and expertise in the field of education. The current research method is a mixture, meaning that both quantitative and qualitative methods were used. Data were analyzed using an exploratory mixed method approach. It consists of two parts. The first part presents qualitative results on collecting mixed data (experimental, theoretical). By first implementing the transcript of the interviews, and then analyzing the content of the data obtained from the open coding process. The second part is related to presenting the quantitative results and processing the results of the qualitative stage using the multi-criteria best-worst method (BWM), which is considered one of the causal prediction techniques. The main themes that emerged were related to international collaboration, brand leadership, social media strategies, school infrastructure, brand strategy, client analysis, brand community, and brand competitive analysis. The results of the study indicate that the most important and best standards for building a brand in private schools in Baghdad Governorate, according to the opinion of experts, international cooperation came in first place in terms of ranking, while the second-ranking went to brand leadership, and the third-ranking went to the share of school infrastructure. Integrating international cooperation with strong brand leadership strategies and investing in effective infrastructure can contribute to enhancing the success and sustainability of the brand in the long term. Despite the importance of the brand strategy in building and strengthening the brand, the results showed that it is ranked last among other criteria, as some weaknesses could affect the effectiveness of this strategy.
