The Importance of Being Eton: Why Brand Hierarchy Now Beats a $162M Campus for International Schools

In August 2026, one of Thailand's largest infrastructure groups will close a school they spent $162 million building and reopen it under the name Wycombe Abbey. Same campus. Same location. Higher fees.

That decision tells you everything about where the international schools market is right now.

In this episode, I break down why the first phase of international education, the infrastructure bet, has hit its ceiling, and what Phase Two actually looks like. It is not about building better campuses. It is about brand hierarchy. And the schools winning that competition are not the newest or the best funded. They are the ones with the deepest proof that their name opens doors.

We look at Wycombe Abbey in Bangkok, Wellington replacing Haileybury across Kazakhstan, and what Eton has understood for five hundred years that most operators are only now starting to price in.

If you are running, investing in, or advising an education or sports property, this episode is about the asset on your balance sheet you probably are not measuring correctly.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to the pitch where we break down the deals, the strategies, the decisions that build the biggest properties in the business. I'm Jean Martin, so let's dive in. In Bangkok, June 2026, there's a school that's closing, and it's closing not because it's failed, not because enrollment collapsed or or sell-through rates came down, not because the market moved against it. It's closing simply because the owner decided to put a different name above the door. It's Verso International School, which opened in 2020. It's got a purpose-built campus, one of the most impressive ones in Southeast Asia and the world, probably. The whole project costs north of $160 million. And in August 2026, the same buildings, the same location, the same infrastructure, is going to reopen as Wickham Abbey International School of Bangkok. Wickham Abbey is an English boarding school founded in 1896, 130 years of history, a name that carries significant weight with a very specific kind of affluent global family. The fees for Wickham Abbey are starting in Bangkok, are starting at around 19,000 euros a year and go up to 32,000 at senior level. Those are substantially higher than what Verso was charging to date. And that's again for the same buildings, for the same infrastructure. That single fact is what this episode is about. Why would one of the most well-funded infrastructure groups in Southeast Asia spend $160 million building a campus, operate it for five years, close it, and reopen it under someone else's name and someone else's brand? The question actually tells us everything that we need to know about the international school market right now, and more importantly, where it's going. Let's um talk about the numbers first, because they are nothing short of extraordinary. In the year 2000, there were approximately 2,500 international schools globally. Today, according to ISC research, there are north of 15,000. That's a six-fold increase in 25 years. These schools now educate 7.6 million students worldwide, and they generate $69 billion in fees of income in income fees annually. Over the last five years alone, that number of schools has grown by 8%, and student enrollment has grown by 13%. And private equity always has a thesis. In this case, there is a massive underserved market for premium international education, families are willing to pay, and infrastructure is the bottleneck. So the bet is quite simple. You build better campuses, you open more schools, and the numbers will simply follow. That was the so-called phase one thesis. And for a period of time it was actually probably correct, at least from the PE side of the equation. Take Thailand as a good example. In 2014, 100 international schools. By 2025, 275 international schools. Student enrollment in that sector grew from fewer than 50,000 to north of 100,000 now. The market grew at an average of 6.9% a year over the decade. And every new school that opened found students. So demand was always strong. And now Verso was a phase one asset in the purest sense as well. So BTS Group is part of one of Thailand's largest infrastructure conglomerates. They invested the 160 million that we've noted before. They've built a campus that could compete with anything in Southeast Asia for sure. And they opened it in 2020. The campus has clearly delivered on its promise. What it could not deliver on was the one thing the campus alone was actually never going to provide. And I guess this is where phase one hits its natural ceiling. You look at Thailand again, and education leaders are explicitly flagging that the sector is going to reach saturation within the next three years. The pool of school-age children is shrinking, the birth rates are falling, the competition is intensifying between international schools, bilingual schools, private schools. They're all fighting for the small pool, the smaller pool of eligible students. And the schools they expect to survive are the ones that have been operating for over a decade. More than ten years. That's one market, of course. But it's probably a leading indicator for what is going to happen elsewhere as well. At some point, supply catches up with demand in every market. And when it does, the question changes and the dynamics change. And the question is no longer can I fill these seats? The question becomes, why would you choose my school over the one down the road? That also has a beautiful campus, that also has a science lab, that also offers the IB or DA levels, that also has a swimming pool, it has a performance arts center, that has and so on and so on. You get the point. The answer to the question is not facility. That's clear. The answer is it's brand. In 2008, a British journalist called Nick Fraser wrote a book, um, personal favorite called The Importance of Being Eaten. The title is uh obviously a play on Oscar Wilde, um, and the argument is worth spending a moment on. What is exactly a family paying for when they send a child to Eton? The fees themselves give you a sense of the answer. They currently charge roughly 63,000 pounds a year per student. Um it's produced Eton has produced 20 prime ministers in the UK. 6.5% of children in the UK attend private schools, some important stats here. Um those schools produce roughly 31% of Oxford University admissions. So that disproportionate outcome is the product. It's not the teaching, it's not the classroom, it's not the campus. The product which the school is selling is what the school actually unlocks for its students after they leave. The networks, the pathways, uh, the doors that it opens. Ultimately, it's the signal that the name carries to ever anyone who reads it. Fraser's argument is that Eton's value is fundamentally about access. Access to a network built over centuries that compounds in value every year as more influential people add their names to it. You can't buy that network. You can't build it in five years, you can't create it by spending a hundred, a hundred and fifty, two hundred thousand million dollars on a campus. You have to earn it slowly over generations and generations. And that is the asset that international schools and the international school market has spent 25 years and billions of dollars discovering it actually needs. So this is what I would call the second phase of the competition. In um phase one, schools competed on infrastructure and curriculum. In phase two, it's all about brand hierarchy. And the brand hierarchy in international education is not being built from scratch. It's actually being imported. Specifically, it's um being imported from British independent schools that spent the last 100 or 200 years accumulating the exact kind of institutional credibility that the market now needs. Another example to look at is Kazakhstan. Halebury School was founded in 1862. It opened its first international campus in Almaty in 2008, the first British independent school in Central Asia. By 2011, it had a second campus in Astana. And for 15 years, Halebury effectively owned the premium British brand positioning in Kazakhstan. From the summer of 2027, both campuses will become Wellington College Campus. Uh Wellington College School, apologies. Wellington Almaty, Wellington Astana. Same campuses, the same ownership, the same non-for-profit model, the same reinvestment of revenue prof uh directive. The only thing that's changed is the name above the door again. And again, this is not a story about a failing school. The owner had invested in a brand, a new science technology facility, just months before this announcement. This is actually a group actively building its assets. At the same time, Charterhouse, one of the oldest schools in England, is opening its first international campus in Almaty as well, September 2026. Not because there was no competition in Central Asia, because the competition has moved up a level. And it's no longer British versus local, it's British Platform 1 versus British Platform 2. Wellington versus Hailbury versus Charterhouse. And that's specifically in Kazakhstan. BTS, BTS group, um spent 160 million on the campus. After five years, they asked themselves the same question the Kazakhstan owner asked. What is the most valuable thing we can put above this door? And the answer was not Verso. Verso is a product. Wikamabi is a brand. And a brand, when it carries 130 years of proof that it delivers, is worth a lot. Proof of delivery on the promise. This extracts a fundamentally different price from the marketplace as well, of course. So they're able to charge a lot more than they would have in the old brand. In their own words about the transition, BTS Group described this as elevating education for upper class families into a premium asset. The infrastructure was already premium. What they were adding was the brand proof, the certainty, the network, that specific signal that we discussed earlier. This isn't a curriculum adjustment. It's a commercial decision about where you sit in the hierarchy. Which brings us to the investment community, because this is where the real implications sit. Private equity entered international schools with a growth thesis, more students, more schools, more academic revenue, classic growth metrics for a P-backed enterprise, whatever it may be. And for phase one, those were probably the right metrics, but phase two has very different economics. The school generating the highest fee premiums are not the newest or the best resource or the biggest campuses. They are the ones with the deepest brand credibility. Premium international school, a bit the margins, range from 20 to 20 to 35% at the top tier. And the delta between the brand school and the campus school at the same location, the same facilities, is actually measurable and it's significant. So private equity groups optimizing for academic revenue growth are now going to be forced to confront a more complex set of questions. Because the competitive battle is shifting and it's going from infrastructure to proof of product. And proof of product in the international school context is not just academic results. It's the full depth of what the school unlocks for its students beyond the classroom. Sports programs, enrichment, university pathways, scholarship access, arts, entrepreneurship, leadership, the things that prove every year to every family who writes a check that this particular school is opening doors at the same depth and breadth as its brand promises. The Legacy Independent Schools have an enormous structural advantage here. They have been delivering on that promise for a very, very long time. Every Eton alumnus who becomes a prime minister makes that next Eton place worth slightly more. Every Wellington student who gets into Oxford or Harvard makes their Wellington name worth slightly more. The brand compounds automatically. As long, of course, as the delivery holds. For a school that opened six years ago on a hundred sixty million dollars campus, that compound effect does not yet exist. And building it takes longer than a private equity fund cycle allows for. Which is why there's an alternative to borrow it. And this is fundamental strategic decision that's that which is facing every serious operator in the international education right now. Do you borrow brand equity by partnering with an established name, or do you build your own brand over time? Borrowing is faster. It allows P-backed groups to shortcut a trust building process that would otherwise take one or two or three generations. And when you open a Wellington school, you're not starting from zero. You have a track record. You are walking in with 130 years of proof already attached to the Wellington name, for example. That obviously accelerates enrollment, it justifies the premium fees, and it makes the numbers work within the specific fund investment cycle. Building, of course, takes longer, but the ceiling is also higher. IMG Academy is the clearest example of an education business that built its own brand completely from scratch over 46 years. Thousands and thousands of alumni placements, a relentless focus on outcomes, and eventually a $1.25 billion exit. But that's a 46-year journey. And most PE funds do not have 46 years, maybe 4.6 years. The schools that come out of phase two in the strongest position are not the ones that rented a famous British name and thought the work was done. They are the ones that borrowed the brand to buy time. And then spent that time building the depth of experience, pathway, and outcome that the brand equity under uh actually requires underneath it. Because here's the brutal reality. Phase two is not forgiving of a gap between promise and delivery. The market that once rewarded infrastructure now rewards proof. And the family's paying 63,000 pounds of dollars a year or 50,000 or anything in that size of fees, they're not going to wait very long to find out if the proof is real. So let me bring this down to a practical level. If you're running or investing in an international school or thinking about entering this market or just looking at the market, there are three questions this particular phase should demand that you answer. First, are you competing on infrastructure or brand hierarchy? If you opened in the last 10 years and your primary competitive advantage is your campus, you're likely to have a problem. Infrastructure is now table stakes. Catching up to a Wickham Abbey or a Wellington on brand hierarchy is not primarily a capital question. It's a time and delivery question. Secondly, if you need brand equity and you do not have it yet, are you going to borrow it or are you going to build it? Neither is wrong, but you have to be honest about which one you're trying to do and why. Borrowing equals speed and equals speed. That's the strategy. Building is compounding. That's the strategy. The mistake is doing neither or trying to do both. Spending on infrastructure and hoping the brand will appear on its own is not a good idea. Third, what is your non-academic offering? The school building the strongest brand position in phase two are not doing it purely through exam results. They're doing it through the breadth and depth again of what they make available beyond the classroom. Sports pathways, university placements, professional experience, enrichment. The fuller that menu, the more credibly the school can make a promise that Eton has been making for 500 years. The promise that what happens here is going to open doors elsewhere and everywhere. Non-academic revenue is a key part of this story. But it's not necessarily the whole story because the primary value of a serious sports academy, for example, inside a school or a structured university pathway program is not simply the revenue it generates, it's the proof of product it creates. Every student placed in a U.S. college athletic scholarship is a data point in favor of the brand behind it. Every family who comes for the football program and stays for the education is evidence that the school delivers at depth. That proof compounds. Compounds slowly, but it compounds. And the schools that exist today over the last 500, 200, 100 years are proof of that. In August 2026, the Verso campus in Bangkok is going to reopen as Rickham Abbey, the same buildings, the same location again, 130 years of British brand equity above that door, and the fees that reflected. Elsewhere in the world, Wellington is replacing Haylesbury, Charterhouse is entering Central Asia, and everyone's aiming for the top of the market. So phase one of international education was won by the people the people who could write the biggest check. Phase two is going to be won by the people who understand that the most valuable asset in this market was built long before any of them arrived. And the ones winning right now are the ones who either borrowed that asset or have been quietly and consistently building their own version of it for enough time that it's now compounding. And I guess the question for everyone is pretty simple. What side of the equation are you on? Are you building? Are you borrowing? What's your timeline? That's what you need to be thinking about. That was it for today for this episode. If that was useful, subscribe so you don't miss the next one. I'm Joel Martins and I will see you next time.