The Awkward Ambition of Elite British Private Schools Abroad

The occasion was a soccer tournament like many the world over, but, Shakira notwithstanding, this one had a determinedly British bent. The competition was between houses—student groupings traditional in English private education. Pagodas by the pitch bore the signature colors of the Bartle Frere, Edmonstone, Kipling, and Attlee houses. The first two were named for 19th century administrators of British India. The third honored Rudyard Kipling, author of the imperialist panegyric The White Man’s Burden. The last was named for Clement Attlee, the prime minister who established Britain’s National Health Service. All four men attended the English private school Haileybury or its antecedents.

The tourney was taking place at Haileybury Almaty, the first of two Kazakh franchises that have opened since 2008. The move had some strange historical resonances. Haileybury, descended from the East India College, is arguably the school most closely associated with Britain’s imperial past. Kazakhstan, meanwhile, is a vast autocracy, flush with petrodollars yet free for less than three decades after more than a century of near-unbroken Russian or Soviet rule. Out on the AstroTurf, a girl with braces waved a Kipling House banner bearing a hand-drawn hammer and sickle. The poet would no doubt have blanched at the image: When the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, he wrote that one-sixth of the world had “passed bodily out of civilisation.”

Haileybury’s Kazakh outposts—the other is in Nur-Sultan, formerly Astana but renamed in tribute last spring after the country’s president since independence, Nursultan Nazarbayev, stepped down—are part of a wider movement by U.K. private schools. According to consulting firm ISC Research, as of last September, 36 of these schools had opened 73 satellite campuses abroad, with a combined enrollment of 44,952 students and income from annual fees of $1 billion. The wave was partly born of financial pressure, but it has also proved an opportunity for the U.K. to export and celebrate its culture, creating a peculiar form of globalization in which youngsters in the Gulf States and East Asia eagerly adopt British traditions and iconography. Harrow’s school in Beijing trots out its iconic “boater” straw hats for special occasions. Repton School’s campus in Dubai features a grand entrance flanked by turrets.

This global branding opportunity is proving lucrative enough to renew thoughts of empire. “This is not about making a bit of spare cash,” says Mark Abell, a lawyer at Bird & Bird in London who’s worked on overseas franchise arrangements. “This is really about transforming the school into an international education business.”

The original Haileybury is on 500 acres of wooded grounds, about 20 miles north of central London. The campus features the largest academic quadrangle in England, ivied walls, and engraved plaques honoring alumni killed in conflict in regions from Somaliland to Tibet. The quadrangle was originally built for the East India College, which was founded in 1806 to educate administrators for the East India Company. The college closed in 1858, and Haileybury opened on the same site a few years later. In 1942 it merged with another empire feeder school. That school’s antecedent had educated Kipling, whom the Haileybury mythos enthusiastically absorbed.

With more than 830 pupils, Haileybury is among the larger of the U.K.’s 1,326 private schools, a category that suffers from confusing nomenclature. Schools so labeled are, like their U.S. counterparts, largely funded by student fees. For esoteric historical reasons, some—including, most famously, Eton College, alma mater of 20 British prime ministers and Princes William and Harry—are referred to as “public schools.” Government-funded schools, which in the U.S. would be the public ones, are called state schools. Whatever they’re dubbed—henceforth we’ll refer to all fee-paying schools as private—they collectively educate about 6% of the British school-age population. They also make up a disproportionate share of the student body at top universities (40% at Oxford, 35% at Cambridge, 32% at the London School of Economics) and of elite British professions (65% of senior judges, 29% of members of Parliament, 43% of journalists, including this one).

Adjusted for inflation, British private schooling has become three times more expensive since 1980. The rise owes in part to a facilities arms race that ran unimpeded until the financial crash of 2008, as schools once synonymous with character-forming privation became increasingly luxe. John Coles, acting headmaster at Haileybury Almaty, recalls that when he started at the main U.K. campus in 2001, the culture was restrictive enough that teachers would file into the masters’ common room for breakfast in mandatory collar and tie. They were given ironed copies of the Times of London to peruse in place of conversation, which was forbidden. Today the rules are looser, and the facilities include at least half a dozen tennis courts, a climbing wall, and a 25-meter swimming pool. The boarding fee has increased commensurately, rising since 2011 from £27,384 ($35,350) to £36,144 for a senior, slightly more than the pretax income of the average British worker.

As fee escalation put private schools beyond the reach of their traditional demographics, they started admitting more students from overseas, but the gambit had limits. Bringing in too many foreign students risked diluting the Harry Potteresque cachet that had attracted their parents in the first place. “They don’t want to have lots of internationals. They want lots of British kids,” says Lorna Clayton, whose company Academic Families places foreign students in U.K. schools. So the schools came up with franchising, which would bring in money and spread tradition without altering the original product, while also providing overseas parents with a more affordable way for their children to attend internationally reputable schools.

The move was led by what David Turner, a former Financial Times education correspondent and the author of a history of English private schools, calls “the second-tier private schools.” The more academic ones stood snobbishly aside. The first foreign institution opened in 1998, when Harrow School (alumni: Winston Churchill, Benedict Cumberbatch), which is socially renowned but not highly academic, started a subsidiary in Bangkok. That institution, like all but one that followed, was a franchise with branding rights paid for by local investors; the lone exception was a Malaysian outpost wholly owned by Marlborough College (Kate and Pippa Middleton). Levels of oversight by the home schools varied, as did the financial return. In selling British parents on the idea, the schools would often tout the bursaries they could now afford to give British children, an easier sell than directly subsidizing the offspring of others.

The early partnerships weren’t necessarily confidence-inspiring. “They all basically got it wrong,” Abell, the lawyer who’s worked on school franchising, says. “Some of them made terrible mistakes.” One institution accidentally gave away its worldwide intellectual-property rights to a Middle Eastern partner.

Haileybury’s Central Asian project was its first foray overseas. The idea began with a wealthy Kazakh, Serzhan Zhumashov, chairman of the construction company Capital Partners, whose son was attending Haileybury in England. “My brother got this idea when he visited Haileybury U.K.,” says Kalamkas Zhumasheva, who acts as her brother Serzhan’s representative on the Almaty school board. “He wanted to create a big charity project in Kazakhstan, and he has chosen education as the field.” Zhumashov formed a consortium with six other investors, including Bulat Utemuratov, often cited as the country’s richest man. Erlan Ospanov, who represents Utemuratov on the school’s governing body and is the chief executive officer and managing partner of Verny Capital, a venture fund in which Utemuratov invests, confirms that the Kazakh school is structured as a nonprofit. “This is not business at all,” he says. “We are not legally allowed to get dividends.”

Haileybury wouldn’t provide details about the early financing in Almaty. Reuters reported in 2008 that the consortium’s initial investment was $100 million, but a spokesperson for Verny says the figure is incorrect. A person familiar with the arrangement estimates it was $25 million to $50 million.

The pitch to Kazakh parents and students was for a school of comparable quality to the mother ship. Staff in the U.K. describe Haileybury as on par with Eton and St. Paul’s School (John Milton, Edmond Halley), although the perspective isn’t universally shared. Turner says Haileybury “was never a school for the aristocracy, and it was never an academically brilliant school. I would say it is a very respectable school.” Its most recent parentheses-worthy alumnus is Christopher Nolan.

The Almaty school opened in 2008 with a ceremony featuring red balloons bearing the Haileybury coat of arms, musicians in Kazakh costumes, and a fluttering Union Jack. Enrollment that first year was 420, with pupils ranging in age from 5 to 14. There were growing pains as the school tried to connect with its student body. “The Kazakh culture kind of beat the British culture,” recalls Danat Tungushbayev, who attended early on and is now a student at University College London. “Although they were trying to implement a lot of British stuff, it still felt like another ordinary school.”

The British stuff carried on and grew. By 2014, enrollment had risen to 544, including pupils over the age of 16. Older students began taking A-levels, the main academic exam for British students leaving school at 18, eventually tripling the share who got the highest grades to a respectable 54%. (The best-performing U.K. private schools push 90%.) Distinguished guests visited from the U.K., including comedian Dom Joly and footballer David Beckham. Joly, a Haileybury alum, later wrote in a column that the Almaty headmaster had confessed to asking an IT teacher to Photoshop sleeves onto a picture of Beckham, saying “an Englishman sporting tattoos up on the wall—it’s just not right.” (Haileybury couldn’t verify the anecdote.)

Kazakh elites showed up, too—none so prominent as Nazarbayev, whose first visit, some three months after the school’s opening, saw the construction of a paved road, drainage gutters, and new lighting within 36 hours, according to a teacher who’s since left the school. “It’s amazing what gets done when the president’s coming,” the teacher says. The entire day passed, with students growing increasingly restive, before the presidential entourage appeared in darkness around 5 in the evening. Nazarbayev took a tour, with teachers in position to deliver lessons despite the hour. “I like what I see,” he said. “Please open another school, in Astana.”

Three years later, Haileybury Astana opened 604 miles to the north. The Times of London and Source Material, a nonprofit journalism organization, reported last February that the early financing for the school included a $17.3 million loan from Kazzinc, a unit of British-Swiss mining giant Glencore. The report said that the loan was repaid in 2012, and that the company also reported a $23 million investment in the school that year, a 56% stake that it transferred in 2016 to Utemuratov’s foundation. The article, which drew on Russian-language Kazakh corporate filings, also noted that Nazarbayev’s foundation was the next-largest stakeholder, with 26%. (The spokesperson for Verny wrote in a statement that Haileybury Astana is noncommercial and that Utemuratov’s foundation’s property can’t be legally transferred to its founder. “This is a charity project,” the statement said. Glencore’s response to the reporting noted that the investment was disclosed in Kazzinc’s financial statements and said, “Kazzinc has supported the country’s development over the past 20 years, including through occasional strategic investments in the development of Astana as a modern capital of Kazakhstan.”)

Like the Almaty branch, Haileybury Astana includes a number of British trappings. The house names are the same, and a mounted photograph near the entrance shows a scene from the home campus: a hot air balloon hovering above a Romanesque chapel. A mug with an image of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle sits in the headmaster’s office.

Fees for a year range from $6,214 to $25,717, depending on the student’s age. The student body makeup is similar at both schools, though Haileybury Astana includes more diplomats’ children. The school also enters its pupils for the International Baccalaureate exam rather than the A-level. And the climate is distinct—Nur-Sultan is the second-coldest world capital after Ulaanbaatar, situated in a region dubbed Akmola, or “White Grave.” Racks of insulated parkas line the halls so pupils can don warm gear as they file out for fire drills. Kim Holmes, head of the senior school, keeps a chart in her office detailing how long children can play outside in given temperatures. The campus, she says, can feel like an “island in the snow.”

One fall afternoon, a class of 12-year-olds taught by a Greek-American woman named Anastasia Michala could be found reading Boy, an autobiographical book by Roald Dahl describing, strangely enough, the brutalities he suffered at Repton in the 1930s. Michala was also encouraging her pupils to read over short essays they’d composed about important moments in their lives. The essays, written by hand and meant to include both painful moments and proudest achievements, revealed something of the culturally sprawling backgrounds of the children, few of whom spoke English as a first language. “I was born on October 11th 2006 at night,” one read. “My father was German and my mother was kazakh and my father had to fly to Germany and go to work but he could not leave us alone so before flying 6 hours to Germany we did a test try flight to Almaty and back. … We also flew with business class to make it as comfortable as possible.”

It isn’t hard to find students at either Kazakh school from wealthy backgrounds—children of oil barons or other oligarchs. One teacher who taught at Almaty in its early years describes as pivotal the moment when wealthy Kazakh children realize that the driver-bodyguards who cart them to and from school each day work for their families and therefore have no real power over them. “You see one of them, one 6-year-old, screaming at a bodyguard who is 9 feet tall, an ex-Kazakh wrestler,” the teacher recalls. The teacher also encountered an elaborate culture of gifts for staff, including lavish cakes and sewed-up skins containing fermented mare’s milk. “A lot of parents there, they’d recently become very wealthy,” the teacher says. “From being in a position of not having much financial influence, they went to the other extreme, and sometimes when they weren’t able to influence people with money, that was a bit surprising.” The school says it sets out “clear rules around the declaration of gifts, in line with the [U.K.] Bribery Act of 2010” and provides this policy to all staff.

The parents still have a great deal of say in some matters. A British educational professional with connections at Haileybury’s Kazakh schools says that one head teacher’s departure in Almaty—there have been several at both schools—followed a difficult period marked by a widely circulated complaint email from a parent. The professional saw the email, which cited concerns about the teaching staff’s qualifications and behavior. “I know from firsthand experience that there are some parents who have the whip hand over the school management in pretty much any matter you can choose,” this person says. “If they want little Johnny to get passed in an internal exam, he will get passed. If they want that particular teacher to be fired, eventually that teacher will be fired.” Neither Haileybury nor the former head teacher responded to a request for comment on this point. Lynne Oldfield, who spoke with Bloomberg Businessweek in October 2018 while she was headmistress in Almaty, said the parents are “no more demanding than in many independent schools in the U.K.” She left the school last year.

Investors may also take an active interest in the school’s operations. According to a senior figure from Haileybury U.K., at one point, Zhumashov, the main backer in Almaty, got the school to discourage use of Russian, Kazakhstan’s effective lingua franca. (The Soviets suppressed Kazakh, and it still isn’t widely spoken.) The senior figure says despair stemming from the episode almost led Haileybury to “take the signs down.”

Meruyert Kolosova, a Kazakh woman who teaches languages at the school, says, “It wasn’t forbidden, but students were punished for speaking Russian.” She describes the objective as encouraging the use of English. (“There was no interdiction,” writes a spokesperson for Zhumashov’s Capital Partners. “Shareholders do not interfere in the academic process.” Haileybury says any suggestion the school tried to suppress the use of Russian is “completely untrue” and adds, “All academic programmes and operating activities are decided on by the school not by shareholders.”) Russian is today on the syllabus, coexisting with Kazakh language and history instruction that’s compulsory for citizens and optional for others. During one such class in Almaty, a pupil’s exercise book had “Colonial Oppression” double-circled in two colors of marker pen.

The school has been at pains to retain other Russian-born traditions, trying, for instance, to instill the Soviet system’s emphasis on math. “When we first opened, some people had prejudices about the school,” says Aruzhan Koshkarova, who came to the school on a scholarship and was head girl in Almaty in 2018. “It was, like, only rich kids who can’t do math go here.” The school provided leaflets headed “Maths at Haileybury” to reassure local parents that British math isn’t congenitally soft.

Teachers who’ve come from overseas sometimes struggle with local cultural proclivities. Many are convinced that Kazakhs, who often distrust Western medical science, are terminal hypochondriacs. One pupil in Almaty gained notoriety for taking three weeks off after breaking his toe, followed by a revitalizing trip to the United Arab Emirates. “Trying to overcome things like that is really quite difficult,” says one teacher in Almaty. “You just don’t see the child for three weeks and then you say, ‘Where have you been?’ ‘I had a broken toe, and then I went to Dubai, shopping.’  ”

“In our culture we believe that if you go outside without enough clothes on, you can catch a cold easily,” Kolosova says. “Kazakh parents don’t really believe that cold comes from virus. English find that funny.” Galym Dosmambetov, who spent five years at Almaty before studying in Switzerland, says any hypochondriacal tendencies trace to class. “If you talk about the average Kazakh person, he can climb mountains, he can jump, he can do whatever in terms of physical abilities,” he says. “But if you talk about spoiled kids, they tend to do this a lot.” Some students think the teachers are just stereotyping. “Sometimes they’re, like, ‘Oh, you’re Kazakh sick, so you’re not really sick.’ And sometimes it’s a joke, but at the same time it’s not really,” says one 16-year-old pupil at Almaty. “There’s a certain boundary that I don’t think the teachers should cross.”

Gender relations can be trickier still. Stephanie Tebow, an American counselor with the title director of community well-being at the Almaty school, sees female students, no matter how wealthy, upset by narrow cultural expectations. She recalls one Kazakh girl telling her, “Last night at dinner, I said something at the table, and all my brothers looked at me and go, ‘Oh, look, the dishwasher’s speaking.’ ” Other girls, Tebow says, have described being told things like, “I don’t know why I’m spending all this money on your education—you are a woman, after all.”
 

In the main, Kazakh parents seem content with the schools. “We’re really happy that in my own country, we can find a school like Haileybury, with absolutely British system with all principles and all rules, like in U.K.,” says Ainora Ashim, whose family business sells organic cleaning products from Germany and who has three children at the Almaty school. The school, too, says it’s been worth it. Martin Collier, Haileybury’s head teacher, told parents in 2018, “Our contacts in Kazakhstan continue to deliver a good source of income for Haileybury, and the schools are firmly established.”

Still, the financial benefits don’t appear to be huge. Paul Watkinson, Haileybury’s partnership director, won’t reveal the revenue from the Kazakh schools, but he suggests it’s comparable to the combined boarding fees of 10 students, which might place it at around £500,000 annually. To put that in context, Tim Williams, the bursar at Wellington School in Somerset, estimates that “half a million a year would seem to be a worthwhile return” for a single school. Abell, the lawyer at Bird & Bird, says, “If you’re looking at making less than £1 million a year when the school’s up and running, then you haven’t done a very good deal.” One institution he’s familiar with wants to make £30 million annually from a network of six overseas schools.

That kind of money is enough to get even tonier schools to the table. London’s storied Westminster School (Christopher Wren, A.A. Milne, Kim Philby) has announced plans for six franchises in China. The somewhat less grand King’s College School, Wimbledon (John Barrymore, two Rothschilds) has two in China and plans to open another in Bangkok. The all-girls North London Collegiate School (Rachel Weisz, Anna Wintour) is starting up in Singapore this year, adding to campuses in South Korea and Dubai. A tier or two down, Reigate Grammar School in Surrey (Andrew Sullivan, Fatboy Slim) wants five locations abroad within a decade.

These overseas plans have brought the schools renewed attention and controversy. After Westminster’s announcement, Andrew Adonis, a former education minister, tweeted, “Westminster School opening 6 offshoots in China sums up how little the ‘public’ schools interact with their own country! They’re all setting up elite offshoots in Far East rather than partnership schools with state sector in England. They shd be in Bradford not Beijing!” (Bradford is a northern English city.) Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, suggested to the Financial Times that Westminster would be in over its head. “They have no idea what they’re dealing with,” he said. “If you set up a school in China, they will have a party secretary superintending the whole school and the party secretary will be responsible for political education.” Westminster told the paper that its Chinese operations would include core curriculum, supplemented by A-levels and other international standards; a spokeswoman described the school’s approach as exercising “soft power” in China.

Then there’s the question of corruption, which U.K. educators have been advised to look out for at home. In November 2018, officials warned schools they were responsible for carefully monitoring payment sources. The following March, the “Troika Laundromat” leak showed that 50 education providers in Britain had received fees from shell companies established by a Lithuanian bank before it went out of business in 2013. (There was no suggestion the schools did anything illegal.)

The issue might be even more pressing abroad, where wealth sources can be still murkier and schools risk getting caught up in broader power politics. The Source Material and Times of London reporting on Glencore’s involvement in the Astana school noted that Utemuratov, to whose foundation it transferred its stake, is a former chief of staff and close associate of Nazarbayev. The authors didn’t suggest that the relationship was illegal, but wrote that it “raises questions about how the company does business in jurisdictions that have a reputation for posing corruption risks.”

Kazakhstan ranked 113th of 180 countries on Transparency International’s 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index. Teachers at the Kazakh schools say students typically either profess ignorance or offer simply “business” when the subject of their parents’ livelihoods come up. Staff members say they avoid asking. Describing the schools’ approach to potentially corrupt provenance of wealth, Haileybury’s lawyers wrote in a statement to Bloomberg Businessweek that “Our client complies with all legal and regulatory obligations in relation to the receipt of fees from parents. It has policies and procedures in place to refer individual cases to the relevant authorities should it have any concerns about the legitimacy of funds it receives. Our client is not aware that any parents are involved in any ‘corrupt’ activities, whatever that may mean.”

Haileybury itself wrote that its role in its Kazakh schools has been “to lend our name and to give advice on delivering a high-quality education. Indeed, the schools are academically strong and pupils achieve excellent results.” It adds, “We have robust, best-practice processes in place for overseas franchising and any suggestion to the contrary is wrong. The rigorous agreements we insist on ensure all franchise schools follow our policies and code of conduct, with all policies published on each school’s website. They ensure regular reporting back to us, tight governance and clear oversight, and cover strict rules around anti-bribery, money laundering and gifts for teachers.”

Haileybury’s next overseas venture is planned for Malta, the Mediterranean island nation that once hosted a major British naval base and has in recent years been at odds with the European Union. In July, Haileybury announced that the government there had provided “unanimous backing” for its project to convert a former British military hospital at Mtarfa, a small northern town. “Haileybury’s highly-successful parallel education model, outstanding academic results, strong international focus and more than 150 years of history,” the school said, “will be a perfect fit to the Maltese landscape and its current aspirations and ideals.”

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