Addressing delegates at the International Private Schools and Education Forum, Ali Aliev, director of business development at North London Collegiate School (NLCS) International, said that for much of the last decade, “the conversation was dominated by growth,” particularly around “how do we enter China and how do we scale in top metropolitan areas and then branch out in tier two cities.”
“In the next 10 years… we will be talking a lot more about protecting ourselves from the headwinds and winning sustainably when markets become more competitive, parents become more discerning, and having a British brand alone is no longer enough,” he told the conference.
Aliev used the international development of NLCS to frame his remarks about the shifting nature of competition for independent schools in the region.
The school’s first overseas campus opened on Jeju island in South Korea in 2011. “We were the first international school on the island. We had 400 students in the opening year, and we benefited from the first-mover advantage,” he said, referring to what he called a “trust premium” enjoyed by early entrants in emerging markets.
He contrasted that period with more recent openings in Dubai, Singapore, Japan, Thailand and Hong Kong, where independent schools now face “more supply, stronger local and regional competition, and a much more informed customer base”.
“Parents manage to compare the schools not on the brand promise, but on the quality of the outcomes and on consistency,” he said.
Aliev argued that in many Asian cities, a well-known UK name now functions mainly as a licence to play. “In a more mature market, brand increasingly functions as an entry ticket, not the guarantee of long-term success,” he said. “The bigger the competition, the further down the pyramid the advantage must travel.”
Moving up that hierarchy, he said, requires clearer articulation of what makes a school different, sustained investment in communicating the brand “not just in our home markets but overseas,” and achieving enough scale that international families and partners are actually aware of the group.
A key theme of the session was the relationship between founding schools and the local operators who run most international campuses on a franchise or partnership basis.
Aliev described a typical division of responsibilities where “the school provides the brand, some guiding principles, checks the standards, and the operators do everything else”.
“Whoever controls the key success practice controls the outcome,” he said. “If the brand controls the promise and the operator controls the execution, the long-term value depends on how well those roles are structured,” and there is a risk that over time “the operator may choose either to carry on with their own brand or to pick the one that better fits with their circumstances.”
He urged schools to think not just about their position in the parent and student market, but also about how they are perceived by potential partners.
“The strongest school enterprises win in two markets, not one,” he said. Alongside the familiar B2C market, there is a second “B2B market where schools compete for operating partners, investors, landlords, developers, and other stakeholders who determine what opportunities one can realistically pursue”.
“Many organisations approach international expansion primarily as selling the rights to use the brand, but in my opinion, international growth is fundamentally an exercise in developing relevant capability,” he said.
He described functions such as site selection, adapting the proposition, assessing commercial feasibility and recruiting teachers as “really strategic capabilities… the system through which the brand is translated into reality.”
The next winners in Asia will be those who choose more carefully and execute more consistently
Ali Aliev, North London Collegiate School
“I would argue that execution consistency is the new brand premium,” Aliev told delegates. “If capability is the engine, then consistency is the premium product.”
He posed a simple test for multi-campus groups: “Does the second school feel like the first? Does the quality of leadership, staffing, culture, and educational delivery remain recognisably coherent across locations?”
Closing the session, Aliev told delegates: “Brand opens doors, but capability keeps them open. Mature markets reward execution, not imitation. The next winners in Asia will be those who choose more carefully and execute more consistently.”
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