Another Country ; Kazakhstan, Dubai Andthailand Are the Unlikely New Locations for Outposts of British Public Schools. Is It a Moneymaking Ploy, Empire- Building or Simply a Survival Tactic Asks Charlotte Eagar

Evening Standard - London › May 26, 2007

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Summary

The news that Haileybury school, supplier of cannon fodder and administrators to the Raj, was opening up in Kazakhstan seems almost absurd.

Borat apart, Kazakhstan is very, very far from Hertfordshire about ten hours in a jet and five time zones, in fact. And gas-rich post-Communist former nomads are not commonly seen near the M1. 'It was an accident,' said Stuart Westley, the Master of Haileybury. 'We had 14 Kazakh pupils in the school. Our reputation got back to Kazakhstan by word of mouth.' Haileybury was approached by a Kazakh firm called Capital Partners. 'They are a commercial operation. They have been successful and they had a vision of putting some of that success back into the country,' said Westley.

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Extract

Another Country ; Kazakhstan, Dubai Andthailand Are the Unlikely New Locations for Outposts of British Public Schools. Is It a Moneymaking Ploy, Empire- Building or Simply a Survival Tactic Asks Charlotte Eagar

Building (by the British architects HOK) starts this month and Haileybury-Almaty (Almaty is Kazakhstan's former capital and second city), rugby, netball and all, is due to open in September 2008. A cricket pitch is currently under discussion.

Although Kazakhstan is the most exotic British public school location, Haileybury was simply following in others' footsteps. Harrow and Shrewsbury have branches in Thailand; Dulwich and Harrow have opened up in China; Repton is opening in Dubai, and Wellington is also moving into the Gulf. On the headmasters' circuit, this is called a franchise school. Schools are approached by local businessmen who want to finance them.

Haileybury, like most, was pretty coy about what exactly was in it for them, but each school gets a flat fee for the use of its name, and a fee per pupil of about four per cent of the annual turnover.

In a school of 1,000, that's Pounds 300,000 a year.

The schools are...

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