51Bloomberg Businessweek March 9, 2020
I
n 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 con-
tinue 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 compara-
ble 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, esti-
mates 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 mil-
lion 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, add-
ing 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 announce-
ment, 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 opera-
tions 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 pro-
viders in Britain had received fees from shell companies estab-
lished by a Lithuanian bank before it went out of business in- (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 associ-
ate of Nazarbayev. The authors didn’t suggest that the relation-
ship was illegal, but wrote that it “raises questions about how
the company does business in jurisdictions that have a repu-
tation 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 igno-
rance or offer simply “business” when the subject of their par-
ents’ livelihoods come up. Staff members say they avoid asking.
Describing the schools’ approach to potentially corrupt prov-
enance of wealth, Haileybury’s lawyers wrote in a statement
to Bloomberg Businessweek that “Our client
complies with all legal and regulatory obli-
gations 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 franchis-
ing 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 par-
allel 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.”