47Bloomberg Businessweek March 9, 2020
Boarding schools
that once trained
young men to run the
British Empire are
opening campuses
for elites in countries
with reputations for
corruption and long
colonial pasts. It could
get awkward
By Simon Akam
Illustrations by
Oscar Bolton
The Posh
School’s
Burden
O
n a Friday afternoon in late 2018, children gathered on
an artificial-grass pitch in Kazakhstan’s former capital
of Almaty. In the distance, beyond the hangarlike buildings
of their school, the Trans-Ili Alatau Mountains were snow-
capped. On the other side rose the glass-walled Ritz-Carlton
hotel complex. Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie blared from the PA.
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 edu-
cation. 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 administra-
tors 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 minis-
ter 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 global-
ization 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 mak-
ing a bit of spare cash,” says Mark Abell, a lawyer at Bird &
Bird in London who’s worked on overseas franchise arrange-
ments. “This is really about transforming the school into an
international education business.”