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Bloomberg Businessweek March 9, 2020T
he original Haileybury is on 500 acres of wooded grounds,
about 20 miles north of central London. The campus fea-
tures 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 origi-
nally built for the East India College, which was founded in 1806
to educate administrators for the East India Company. The col-
lege 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 his-
torical 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 pub-
lic 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 disproportion-
ate 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 profes-
sions (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 head-
master 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 conversa-
tion, which was forbidden. Today the rules are looser, and the
facilities include at least half a dozen tennis courts, a climb-
ing 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 andspread 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 for-
eign 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 institu-
tion accidentally gave away its world-
wide intellectual-property rights to
a Middle Eastern partner.
Haileybury’s Central Asian proj-
ect was its first foray overseas. The idea
began with a wealthy Kazakh, Serzhan Zhumashov, chair-
man 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 representa-
tive 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 coun-
try’s richest man. Erlan Ospanov, who represents Utemuratov
on the school’s governing body and is the chief executive offi-
cer 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 financ-
ing 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“It was never an academically
brilliant school. I would say it is a very
respectable school”