I was recently surveying the latest rubrics in The Times’ appointments section and noted two public schools seeking what are effectively business development directors for their schools’ international expansion. I guess I hadn’t realised that what had started as a trickle of ad hoc satellite schools in Thailand and China was quickly becoming a deluge in the Middle East and further afield.
Brighton College and Wellington College are two of the schools which have recently announced mass roll-outs of franchised operations. Brighton College plans to open two schools in Abu Dhabi in 2011 and 2013, with others to follow in Oman, Jordan, Romania, Vietnam and India. Wellington College has plans to open approximately 15 schools, beginning in China in 2011 and following with Malaysia, Qatar, Bahrain and India. This is not a new phenomenon: Dulwich and Harrow have had franchises in China and Thailand for about a decade, while other public schools have created the odd satellite; Repton Dubai, Oxford High GDST in China, Haileybury-Almaty, Shrewsbury Bangkok and Bromsgrove Bangkok come immediately to mind. Brighton and Wellington are fairly unique, however, in the scale of their planned operations. Both are motivated by the franchise fees which will be used to fund bursary places and capital projects in the UK.
The franchising of a marketable British brand (or at least until A Levels are thoroughly discredited through grade inflation and curriculum dilution) outside the UK seems very sensible to me in light of the pressures imposed by the Charities Commission on independent charitable schools to provide “public benefit”. After all, as I discussed in The public benefit that will cut out the middle classes, the absurd result of the Charities Commission’s guidance is that schools will feel compelled to offer more bursaries — bursaries which many do not have the endowments to fund. The result? Increasing fees for non-bursary pupils. Taken to its absurd conclusion, this would result in most charitable schools having a polarised population of very poor and very rich pupils. So taking cash from franchised operations to fund these places in the UK and hence preserving a broad economic spectrum of pupils seems eminently sensible.
The repatriation of profits to Britain may be morally questionable to some. Soft imperialism has been a term that has been bandied about. Frankly, I’m not too worried about that; the premise for the success of these franchises is that there is a stratum of the local foreign market which has the means to pay for a private British education and is more than willing to pay for it. Moreover, I have no doubt that the local population will soon wise up to the fact that they can replicate the British model on their own and squeeze the franchises out once the local market becomes better established. This may be precipitated by the profit motive in the local market or perhaps by nationalist sentiment when locals realise that profits from the satellite schools are funding kids back in Britain rather than kids in New Delhi, Bangkok or Abu Dhabi. I have no doubt that the consumers in these far-flung locations have the wealth and know-how to look out for themselves. Many probably have incomes far in excess of the average parent of a public school child in England.
This is precisely why I think the British public schools engaging in franchising or thinking about it should do so with caution. With the exception of perhaps Harrow, very few of the public schools which are establishing satellites are household names abroad. As much as many of the franchising schools like to think of themselves as major public schools (and let’s face it, most of them are not in this league), the cachet and hence pulling power of most public schools is not so great that they couldn’t be supplanted by generic locally-established British-modelled schools. And when it sinks in that consumers are not really getting a Harrow, Dulwich, Repton or Wellington education but rather a knock-off co-branded education, the momentum for local home-grown competitors to the British satellite schools will grow considerably and threaten the viability of the satellite school model.
Franchising offers an opportunity to certain public schools to ensure that they can meet the public benefit requirement that the Charities Commission has imposed without increasing fees and alienating the middle classes. If they want to take advantage of this they should do so quickly because it won’t take long for satellite school consumers to develop the expertise to establish their own home-grown schools which can give them as much, if not more, than any of our satellite schools can offer. When that happens, the franchisor schools will find their franchise fees dry up and perhaps, if they’re unlucky, they’ll even find they’ve received little return on their investment. and perhaps seen their most valuable asset — their name and reputation — highly devalued. At that point, selling a birthright for a mess of potage comes to mind, and that cannot be a good thing for any school.
Snowdon on Schools 