SINGAPORE (Bloomberg): Rugby School is steeped in over 400 years of history. Its playing fields are where a pupil invented the game of rugby in 1823, exhibiting “a fine disregard” for the rules of football. Parents can buy into this prestige for roughly £59,000 per year, per child.
This autumn, one class of Rugbeians is beginning its studies over 3,000 miles from those famous Warwickshire fields.
Rugby School Nigeria is welcoming its first sixth-form students to a sprawling new campus on reclaimed land along the Lagos coastline, with younger pupils to follow soon.
The academic outpost is the brainchild of Rugby School Global, a subsidiary that presides over the school’s growing number of foreign sites, and Eko Atlantic, a new district built on land dredged from the sea in Nigeria’s financial capital.
The arrangement is part of a boom in British private schools setting up abroad in a bid to drive revenue, at a time when cost pressures at home are rising. Fee-paying schools in the UK educate just 7% of the population, but this cohort includes many political leaders, Nobel laureates and the upper echelons of society.
Previously, families across the globe would have aspired to ship their children here for an elite education. Now, more options than ever are on their doorstep. The UK government has lent its support to these efforts by British institutions to team up with companies overseas to establish and sometimes run schools. But expansion comes with the risk of partnerships that don’t live up to their centuries-old reputations.
Under Pressure
There are roughly 2,500 private schools in the UK, with about half holding charitable status.
The British-international school boom has been “recent and large,” according to the Private Education Policy Forum think-tank. Schools had 51 satellite campuses in 2017-18, which had trebled to 151 by 2024-25.
Overall, profit from overseas campuses has increased 18-fold in a decade, reaching £29 million in 2022-23, according to the PEPF study, which was carried out by the University of Manchester.
This work has accelerated since the government imposed a 20% tax on independent school fees this year, according to industry experts.
ISC Research, which helps set up UK schools with potential overseas partners, counts Charterhouse, The King’s School Canterbury and Bedford among its clients. Bharati Thakore, head of school development, said the tax change is the driving force behind the boom in campuses opening abroad.
“British schools have become much more pro-active because of the VAT increase,” she said in an interview. Schools also have an eye on growing competition from American and Australian institutions, as well as local independent providers, so they build improvements to “keep up” with the market, she said.
Jack Myers, senior account director at Alder, a communications firm specializing in crisis PR for schools and colleges, said that while traditions are assets, they come with strings attached. Alumni can be sensitive to their school’s legacy being commercialized, he said, advising schools engage with them to mitigate against the “obvious reputational risk” associated with foreign growth.
Barnaby Lenon, former headmaster of Harrow School and former chairman of the Independent Schools Council, knows about the obstacles schools face. He opened several Harrow outposts abroad including in China and Hong Kong.
“It’s very important to be clear about why these independent schools have set up so many of these schools abroad, and the reason is because they wanted to make money,” he told Bloomberg. “And the reason they wanted to make money was to pay for bursaries. Means-tested bursaries for children from Britain whose parents couldn’t otherwise afford the fees.”
According to Lenon, the main reputation risk derives from the school’s dealings with foreign business partners, which can cause problems if they fall through. He remembers Dulwich College attempting to set up its first satellite school in Phuket, Thailand two decades ago, with the school struggling to agree terms with the Thai investors.
“Although that provided them with no doubt a week of slight embarrassment, there was no really long term serious consequence. And they continued setting up schools across the world very successfully,” he said.
Lenon said schools should look for partners that can make the project commercially viable. “There has to be full due diligence done by the parent school of the business partner. And normally in my experience these are not people who just come out of the blue. Quite often they’re alumni of the school in England or they are known to governors or staff of the school,” he said.
Harrow, USA
Harrow is one of Britain’s most established – and profitable – providers of overseas education.
The west London private school, where alumni such as Winston Churchill were educated, opened its maiden international offshoot in Bangkok in 1998. It’s now launching its first US campus. The Long Island, NY institution is licensed to use Harrow’s name and badge, though it’s owned, funded and operated by India’s Amity Education Group.
Amity bought the 170-acre campus almost ten years ago with a different goal in mind. According to a press release at the time, the site was to be used as “a platform for research collaboration” as well as education. The Indian firm had also planned to buy two for-profit colleges, though these deals were dropped following criticism from US officials.
Maura Healey, then-attorney general in Massachusetts, told the Associated Press in 2016 she was “very very skeptical” of the group’s ability to provide education to US students given its lack of track record in the country.
Still in possession of the Long Island site, Amity shifted its focus and announced the tie-up with Harrow in 2021. It’s also opened a Harrow outpost in Bengaluru, India.
The organization has faced scrutiny at some of its schools over the years. In 2005, India’s educational regulator revoked the license of an Amity business school over unapproved courses, opaque admissions, and inflated fees.
In 2018, Amity disaffiliated with three institutions at GGSIPU in Delhi amid protests and a lawsuit over the suicide of a student who said he’d been prevented from taking his exams.
“When selecting potential partners, we engage expert independent advisers to conduct thorough due diligence,” a spokesperson for Harrow said in an emailed statement. All partnerships “are subject to ongoing review to ensure they consistently uphold our expectations.”
Like many schools expanding abroad, Harrow charges fees that vary by location. Its first US site is charging up to $75,000 a year for boarding students – that’s slightly cheaper than the UK school’s roughly £63,735 annual cost (or around $83,500 at current exchange rates) but a pricier option than tuition and board at Harrow in Hong Kong, which can be as much as HK$369,775 (around $47,560).
Matthew Sipple, principal of the new US school, said in a previous Bloomberg News story that the expansion is “not about the finances – it’s about creating a lasting legacy.”
New Partners
In 2022, Wellington College partnered with Singaporean businessman Peter Lim to open three schools in Southeast Asia.
Lim’s company, WCI Regional Management, signed a master license agreement with the British boarding school with plans to accommodate up to 2,000 students each in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Wellington had been scheduled to open its first campus in the region this year, although the college said the plans were delayed due to Covid and other factors. “It is now on track to open its first campus in Jakarta next year. We will disclose more details soon,” said Tan Wee Han, CEO of Wellington College Education Singapore Group.
The partnership marks a first foray into the business of education for Lim, a 71-year-old billionaire who made his fortune as a stockbroker in the 1980s before becoming a private investor.
He’s now perhaps better known as the owner of Spanish football club Valencia, where fans have criticized his management of the club.
Not every partnership deal goes to plan. Magdalen College School agreed in September 2021 to launch schools across China, which were to be owned and operated by Hong Kong-listed property company KWG Group Holdings.
KWG was caught up in the Chinese real estate crisis shortly after, ultimately defaulting on its dollar bonds and then restructuring. In 2023, Magdalen said it had ended the collaboration. Still, the Oxford school has gone on to launch overseas partnerships this year in Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, according to its website.
A spokesperson for Magdalen College School said its partnerships “bolster our financial resilience, enabling us to maintain competitive school fees while continuing to attract and retain the very best teachers, invest in the school estate and deliver the highest quality of teaching and learning to pupils.”
Rugby, Lagos
As Rugby School Lagos opens its doors for the new academic year, it does so with the financial backing of a billionaire family with close ties to the Nigerian government.
Eko’s developer is the Chagoury Group, a conglomerate founded by tycoon brothers Gilbert and Ronald Chagoury – both fixtures of Nigerian politics and business for decades. Gilbert also paid $1.8 million in 2021 to resolve allegations that he and others provided approximately $180,000 that was used to support four US federal political candidates, in violation of election laws, according to the US Department of Justice.
Neil Hampton, CEO of Rugby School Global, the arm of the school responsible for overseas expansion, told Bloomberg the Chagoury Group approached Rugby in the hope the school would provide “educational expertise” for the Eko Atlantic campus.
After spending time with members of the Chagoury Group in the UK, Rugby’s team were convinced of their viability as business partners. “Clearly the Chagoury Group and Eko Atlantic do understand finance and business but equally they understand the mission – which is about educating young people,” he said.
Rugby gets at least one speculative approach a week from someone interested in opening a school overseas, Hampton said. To sort through the requests, Rugby employs external help.
“A brand which is more than 450 years old like Rugby, which has international schools around the world and a reputation to uphold in the UK – we need to be absolutely clear that the people we’re partnering are the right kinds of people,” said Hampton.
It’s not unusual for the Chagoury family to be supporting a school in this way. The family’s business and philanthropic interests are vast, including funding a nursing school at the Lebanese American University and a gallery at the Louvre established with a Chagoury donation. Gilbert Chagoury is currently serving as the St. Lucian ambassador to the Holy See.
Government Support
Another vocal supporter of Rugby’s international expansion has been the British High Commission in Nigeria, which sent a delegation to visit the campus over the summer. Deputy High Commissioner Jonny Baxter described the project as an “outstanding example of UK-Nigeria collaboration.”
His words echoed the sentiment of the British government on overseas campuses. Under Theresa May’s government, the Department for Business and Trade set out plans to “encourage independent schools to access international opportunities,” vowing to help “connect providers and investors.”
A spokesperson for the DBT said that “while we help introduce schools interested in growing internationally to potential partners, we always advise UK businesses to conduct independent and comprehensive due diligence as well as other necessary checks before any formal agreements are made.”
–With assistance from Jorge Zuloaga, Yinka Ibukun and Chris Miller.
©2025 Bloomberg L.P.