分类： education

A wave of prestigious centuries-old British public private boarding schools is launching new international campuses across India, driven by shifting regulatory and market conditions in their traditional overseas expansion hubs. Earlier this year, 473-year-old Bedford School, a historic Bedfordshire institution, unveiled its first all-girls international satellite campus in Mohali, on the outskirts of Chandigarh in India’s Punjab state. Unlike the iconic Gothic central buildings that define its original UK grounds, the Mohali facility features sleek, purpose-built modern academic blocks, with a distinctive red-brick clock tower paying deliberate homage to the school’s British heritage.

Bedford is far from the only elite UK educational institution making inroads into India. At least six long-established British fee-paying private schools, including three of the UK’s oldest educational foundations, have now established locations spanning the breadth of the nation. This cohort includes Harrow School — alma mater of India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru — which opened its Bengaluru campus in 2023 in India’s Silicon Valley, a bustling hub of tech firms and startup activity. Shrewsbury School operates a site in Bhopal, central India, while Wellington College has set up operations in Pune, the western Indian city known as the “Oxford of the East” for its dense network of top-tier higher education institutions. Renowned schools including Millfield and Queen Elizabeth’s School are also in advanced stages of planning their own Indian campuses for coming years.

The expansion surge comes as external pressures reshape the global business model for UK private schools. For more than a decade, China and Hong Kong hosted roughly half of the 151 total international satellite campuses run by 50 British private schools, serving as the primary engine of their overseas growth. However, a 2025 report from UK think tank the Private Education Policy Forum (PEPF) notes that expansion in the region has slowed sharply amid tighter regulatory oversight, rising government scrutiny and public pushback against foreign-run private institutions. A 2024 national Chinese mandate requiring all schools to integrate patriotic education across every curriculum subject further disrupted operations, leading to multiple planned new campus projects being scrapped entirely. Compounding these headwinds, the UK government’s 2024 Autumn Budget introduced a new 20% VAT levy on domestic private school fees, set to take effect January 1, 2025. Naomi Atkins, founding principal of Bedford School Mohali, explains that even UK private schools that previously had no interest in international expansion are now actively pursuing overseas markets to offset domestic revenue strains, describing many institutions as being in a “desperate situation.”

India presents a uniquely attractive alternative market for these legacy schools. For generations, local elite boarding schools modelled on the British colonial public school system have served the country’s aristocratic and upper-class families, but the market has expanded exponentially in recent years as a fast-growing cohort of newly affluent Indian families prioritize global educational exposure for their children. Caroline Pascoe, head of Harrow Bengaluru, notes that the school’s all-through Cambridge curriculum — a globally recognized framework used across 10,000 institutions worldwide, spanning primary education all the way through to A-level qualifications — is a major draw for local families. Many parents, including Harsimran Singh Kocchar, a local education network operator who enrolled his 5-year-old daughter at Bedford Mohali, cite the schools’ stated focus on holistic character development, confidence building and equitable treatment of all students, free of the “VIP culture” that permeates many top-tier Indian private institutions, as key deciding factors. The student base also includes large numbers of non-resident Indians, both expats who have returned to India after long stints abroad and families still based in the UK or Middle East who want their children to maintain cultural ties to their Indian roots.

The schools work to preserve their iconic British traditions while integrating local Indian customs to resonate with their student bodies. At Harrow Bengaluru, 60% of the teaching staff are international hires, students wear the signature traditional Harrow hats and uniforms, teachers are referred to as “Beaks”, pupils take part in the global cross-country running event the Long Ducker, and the classic British house system forms the backbone of campus social life. These practices are paired with local cultural elements, including daily recitals of the Indian national anthem and celebrations of major festivals such as Ganesh Chaturthi, alongside a robust roster of extracurricular programs in music, drama and sports.

Despite these promising market conditions, operating in India has presented unforeseen challenges for the UK institutions. Almost all new campuses are launched via joint ventures with local education investors, and Atkins notes that typical revenue share margins for the British school brands have shrunk from a standard 10% in other markets to as low as 1% in some Indian partnerships. Many schools also overestimated the size of their target demographic: while India has 250 million total enrolled schoolchildren, widespread pre-existing English-language education infrastructure and a highly competitive local private school sector create far stiffer competition than in non-English-speaking markets like China, Vietnam or South Korea. India’s relatively low per capita income also limits the addressable market, as full boarding fees at top British campuses can reach £15,000 per year, a price point out of reach for the vast majority of families. Atkins notes Indian parents are far more price-sensitive than families in other Southeast Asian education markets, prompting Bedford Mohali to set its fees at roughly half the rate of competing British international schools to stay competitive.

PEPF data shows that between 2011-12 and 2022-23, British private schools’ global satellite campuses generated a combined total of £152.4 million in cumulative profits, with that figure rising steadily year over year. However, analysts and school leaders agree that growth in India will be slow and steady rather than the explosive expansion seen previously in China. While the country’s shared colonial educational heritage and fast-expanding new wealthy class create a significant long-term opportunity for the legacy British institutions, the Indian market is unlikely to fully offset the lost revenue from China for the foreseeable future.

After a years-long campaign by pro-Palestinian student and faculty organizers, newly released financial records from the City University of New York (CUNY) have confirmed the public university system holds more than $715,000 in investments in major weapons manufacturers that supply military equipment and technology to the Israeli military. The disclosures, which came via a court-ordered settlement following a freedom of information lawsuit, mark a rare instance of a U.S. university publicly confirming such holdings, a detail most higher education institutions have long kept hidden from public view.

The records, obtained by two campus advocacy groups — CUNY4Palestine and CUNY Law Students for Justice in Palestine (CUNY Law SJP) — reveal CUNY’s investment portfolio includes stakes in six major defense and military technology firms: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Palantir, Elbit Systems, and General Dynamics. All six firms openly maintain active supply contracts with the Israeli army. A breakdown of 2025 holdings shows CUNY holds more than $319,000 in Boeing stock, roughly $65,300 in Lockheed Martin stock, $141,200 in Raytheon stock, and nearly $189,350 in Palantir stock — figures that activists say exceeded their initial expectations.

Pro-Palestinian organizers have long flagged the specific role each firm plays in Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which launched after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on southern Israel. To date, the conflict has left more than 250,000 Palestinians in Gaza killed or injured and reduced much of the enclave to rubble. Activists note Boeing produces F-15 fighter jets, AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, and bunker-buster bombs that have been used in strikes across Gaza, Lebanon, and other regional conflict zones; Lockheed Martin and Raytheon manufacture the missiles and munitions deployed by Israeli ground and air forces; and Palantir provides surveillance and data management technology that the Israeli military relies on for targeting operations.

In a joint statement released this week, the two advocacy groups argued CUNY’s financial ties to these firms make the university directly complicit in what they call the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza. A CUNY faculty organizer, speaking through the groups, extended that criticism further, saying the investments also make CUNY complicit in broader imperialist violence across West Asia and the Global South, as well as in what they describe as fascist border enforcement carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The release of the records follows years of organizing and transparency demands from pro-Palestinian groups on CUNY’s campuses. CUNY was one of the first U.S. universities to join the wave of Gaza solidarity encampments that spread across higher education institutions in April 2024, starting at Columbia University, where protesters demanded administrations disclose and divest from companies supplying Israel. Though ties between U.S. academia and the defense sector have long been an open secret, most universities have refused to release detailed breakdowns of their investment holdings to the public.

In 2024, after the escalation of conflict in Gaza, CUNY4Palestine and CUNY Law SJP filed a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request to force CUNY leadership to release full details of its defense industry investments. When university administrators refused to turn over the records, activists and a student plaintiff filed a lawsuit — Sarah Southey v. City University of New York — to compel disclosure. The case reached a settlement in mid-August that required CUNY to release all investment records dating back to July 2023.

Veronica Salama, senior staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union, which supported the lawsuit, noted that while the disclosure marks a win for transparency, it is unacceptable that legal action was required to get public information from a taxpayer-funded institution. “While we’re grateful that the largest, urban public university in the country will finally disclose its investment records, it is outrageous that our client had to file this lawsuit in the first place,” Salama said in a statement.

On Wednesday afternoon, campaigners planned a press conference outside New York City Hall to lay out the full details of the disclosures to the public. Activists say the released records are only the first part of a larger body of investment data, framing the $715,000 figure as “just the tip of the iceberg.” They have vowed to continue their campaign until CUNY divests all holdings from arms firms and redirects that funding toward institutional and community programs that serve public good. “As we declared during CUNY’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment: we will not stop, we will not rest until our tax and tuition dollars are divested from death and destruction and reinvested in life-sustaining institutions and practices! We demand CUNY live up to its name as a ‘People’s University!’” the groups’ statement read.

The disclosures are also drawing new scrutiny to CUNY leadership and the crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests on its campuses. While high-profile encampments at Ivy League institutions like Harvard and Princeton drew widespread national and international media attention, CUNY’s protest movement has received far less coverage. Organizers and analysts argue that makes the new revelations even more significant: as the nation’s largest urban public university serving a working-class, majority minority student body across New York City, CUNY’s investment decisions carry unique public weight.

Critics are also pointing to the political ties of CUNY’s top investment leadership. William C. Thompson, who currently chairs CUNY’s board executive committee and investment subcommittee — a post he has held since 2016 — was reappointed to a six-year term in June 2023 by New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a well-known staunch supporter of Israel. CUNY has not yet responded to requests for comment from media outlets including Middle East Eye, which first reported on the disclosures.

The 2023 round of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the world’s most comprehensive standardized evaluation of 15-year-olds’ academic proficiency, has delivered a stark warning to education systems across high-income economies: average scores in core subjects of math, reading, and science have hit their lowest point in the program’s 20+ year history.

Organized by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the 2023 assessment drew more than 760,000 participants across dozens of nations, with results published this week confirming widespread declines. Even in the United States, which placed within the global top 15 for science, reading, and the new computational problem-solving category, scores for reading and math have fallen to their lowest level since PISA launched in the early 2000s — a trend that was only masked slightly by broader declines across other developed nations. Researchers also note the U.S. results should be interpreted with caution, as the country failed to meet the study’s required sample size standards for participating schools and students.

What is driving this global slump in academic performance? OECD officials point to two interconnected factors: declining parental engagement in children’s learning, and unregulated overuse of digital and artificial intelligence tools in and out of the classroom.

An accompanying student survey paired with PISA assessments found that nearly every high-income country recorded a drop in family investment in education between 2018 (the last full PISA round) and 2023, with the sharpest disengagement observed among boys. This disengagement is measured by how frequently parents discuss schoolwork with their children or actively participate in their learning progress. Andreas Schleicher, director of the OECD’s education and skills division, notes that many parents have shifted their perspective from active co-participants in education to passive clients of school systems.

The performance gap tied to parental engagement is substantial. Even after adjusting for socioeconomic differences between students, teenagers who reported that a family member asks about their daily school experience at least once a week scored 35 points higher on the PISA science assessment than peers with less engaged families. That gap is equivalent to more than a year and a half of additional learning.

Digital distraction is the second major contributor to falling scores. More than one in four students across high-income countries reported that classmates are distracted by personal digital devices in most or every science class. Data confirms that nations with strict school policies governing cellphone use see significantly lower distraction rates. When it comes to leisure use of digital devices, the link between heavy use and lower test scores is clear, Schleicher says, though the picture is more mixed for educational digital use: students who used edtech for 2 to 3 hours per day during school saw small score gains, but performance drops sharply once use exceeds that threshold.

For artificial intelligence tools, the pattern mirrors that of general digital technology. Half of all students in developed economies now use AI chatbots for learning at least once a week, but the assessment found that higher AI use correlates with lower overall test scores, with students who never use chatbots outperforming their peers who use these tools regularly. That said, some nations have found a balanced, effective approach to integrating AI into learning: in China, Japan, Singapore, and Estonia, AI is used to support — not replace — teacher-led instruction. Schleicher highlighted one example from a Chinese elementary school, where students practice traditional ink calligraphy, and teachers use AI to scan and analyze student work to deliver personalized feedback on handwriting improvement — blending traditional teaching methods with AI-powered support, rather than letting technology lead classroom activity.

Top performing spots in the 2023 PISA rankings were once again dominated by East Asian economies. Mainland China (with four provinces, Hong Kong, and Macao participating), Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea took the highest overall marks, with Estonia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand also ranking among the top performers. Fewer than 10% of students in top-ranked East Asian nations reported classroom digital distraction, a fraction of the rate seen in North America and Western Europe. In the four participating Chinese provinces, nearly 100% of students scored at or above the baseline proficiency level for math and reading, compared to just 65% for math and 74% for reading in the U.S.

Education experts warn that the growing gap in academic performance between the U.S. and top-performing East Asian systems carries major long-term geopolitical implications. “To win a technological race, you need the people with the science and the technology and the reading capabilities,” said Tracey Burns, chief of global strategy and research at the National Center for Education and the Economy, an organization that studies high-performing education systems worldwide.

Eight years after India established the National Testing Agency (NTA) to fix longstanding flaws in the country’s examination system, the body tasked with restoring public trust in high-stakes standardized testing is now grappling with its own major crisis of credibility.

When the NTA was launched in 2017 under India’s federal Ministry of Education, it was created to deliver a testing framework defined by fairness, transparency, and consistency. For decades prior, India’s national entrance and eligibility exams were plagued by persistent issues: widespread paper leaks, administrative mismanagement, and repeated allegations of organized cheating. Over its first term in operation, the NTA absorbed oversight of the country’s most competitive and high-volume assessments, including undergraduate and postgraduate medical entrance exams, top engineering school admissions, university entry screening, and eligibility tests for teaching and research roles.

The current crisis erupted in June 2025, when a leak of the NEET-UG, India’s critical undergraduate medical entrance examination, forced more than 2 million test-takers to retake the exam. The incident triggered weeks of widespread youth-led protests across the country, which ultimately culminated in the resignation of India’s federal education minister. In response to the public outcry, the government moved quickly to appoint a high-level reform task force, headed by renowned Indian tech tycoon Nandan Nilekani, tasked with identifying structural fixes and rebuilding public confidence in the national testing system.

For many Indian citizens, however, this announcement triggered an all-too-familiar sense of deja vu. In 2024, a similar high-level expert panel was convened after widespread irregularities in another national medical entrance exam sparked mass unrest. That committee put forward more than 100 targeted reforms, but official reports confirm only just over half of these changes have been fully implemented to date. The pattern has become a frustrating cycle for stakeholders: an exam scandal breaks, students take to the streets, a new committee is formed, reform proposals are published, and gaps in the system remain unaddressed—until the next crisis exposes the same unresolved weaknesses.

Experts consulted by the BBC note that the problems facing India’s testing system extend far beyond isolated incidents of paper leaks. Core issues include a lack of institutional accountability at the NTA, insufficient operational capacity, over-centralization of national testing, flawed exam design, and fundamental questions about whether India’s model of high-stakes single-sitting testing is fit for purpose for a country with millions of annual test-takers.

BJ Rao, a member of the 2024 reform panel and current vice-chancellor of SGT University near New Delhi, argues that India must accelerate the transition to fully computer-based testing to cut the risk of paper leaks, boost operational efficiency, and minimize unnecessary human intervention in exam administration. “Digital connectivity has vastly improved across every corner of the country over the past decade. What we need to do now is allocate targeted resources, prioritize upgrading testing infrastructure, and make the full shift to computer-based exams,” Rao explained in an interview. “Right now, we rely on ad hoc, temporary testing centers. These need to be replaced with a network of standardized, state-run online testing facilities across the country.”

Even so, Rao emphasizes that technology alone cannot fix the systemic flaws plaguing the NTA. He points to the agency’s extreme over-reliance on temporary contract staff: official government data shows only 24 of the NTA’s 221 total employees hold permanent positions, and most existing permanent staff come from traditional bureaucratic backgrounds rather than educational assessment. “When the vast majority of personnel work on short-term contracts, there is no real sense of institutional ownership or accountability, and that directly undermines core operational functions,” Rao explained. “We need skilled specialists with deep academic backgrounds and hands-on experience running large-scale assessments to deliver strong management and oversight of the system.”

Other education experts argue that repeated crises have revealed deep flaws not just in how exams are administered, but in how they are structured. Keshav Aggarwal, educationist and president of the Educators Federation, points to the NEET-UG—the exam whose leak sparked this year’s protests—as a test that could be restructured to mirror the format of India’s popular engineering entrance exam, which is fully computer-based and split across two stages. Instead of tying a student’s entire future to a single high-stakes test sitting, Aggarwal proposes holding exams across multiple sessions with unique question sets for each session. “Splitting assessments across different stages and test days with varying question banks would cut the risk posed by any single compromised exam and make the entire system far more resilient to disruptions,” Aggarwal explained.

Many experts also question whether an annual single-sitting exam can ever function fairly when millions of students compete for a tiny pool of limited university seats. Yamini Aiyar, a senior visiting fellow at Brown University, says India should adopt the model common across many Western nations, where students can sit major entrance exams multiple times per year. “This would give students a second chance if an exam is cancelled or they have an off day on test day, eliminating the catastrophic risk of losing an entire year of academic progress,” Aiyar says. That risk is not abstract for millions of young Indians: many spend multiple years preparing for entrance exams and invest tens of thousands of rupees in private coaching, meaning a leaked, cancelled, or delayed exam can completely upend months or even years of careful preparation.

Seventeen-year-old Pari experienced this crippling uncertainty first-hand this year. After sitting for the original NEET-UG exam, she was forced to retake the entire test after the paper leak forced a full cancellation of the initial session. “It was incredibly frustrating. All of our preparation felt like it had gone to waste, and we had to start all over from scratch,” she said. Her experience left her deeply frustrated by the cycle of repeated exam failures across the system. “The government can form as many committees as they want. What we need is a system strong enough to stop paper leaks from happening ever again.”

Twenty-three-year-old Mansi Bansal shares a similar story. She spent months preparing for the UGC-NET, the national eligibility test for entry-level college teaching positions. The exam was first cancelled after a 2024 paper leak, and then delayed again this year after the NTA confirmed question errors across three subject tests. Bansal, who was taking the commerce subject exam, is scheduled to retake the test on September 9. “I put my entire life on hold for these months: I stopped going to the gym, stopped hanging out with friends, even skipped family gatherings,” she said. “I planned my entire year around this exam, and now everything is up in the air. Can the government even promise me another leak won’t happen this time?”

These widespread negative experiences have fueled growing calls from student activists and opposition political parties to abolish the NTA entirely. But most education experts argue that scrapping the agency would not fix the underlying systemic problems, and would likely create new complications. M Jagadesh Kumar, former chairman of India’s University Grants Commission, the national regulator for higher education, says the NTA needs deep structural reform to address repeated failures, but full abolition is not the solution. “A single national testing body allows for uniform security standards, shared technological infrastructure, consistent candidate services, and standardized result processing. Creating multiple smaller testing agencies would only duplicate administrative costs and lead to uneven security safeguards across regions,” Kumar told India’s PTI news agency.

Rao echoed that perspective, noting that the NTA is not entirely without success. “It’s not all bad news. The agency has successfully administered dozens of large-scale exams over the years with no reports of leaks or major irregularities,” he said. What the system requires, Rao argues, is a formal statutory institution staffed by full-time specialists with the academic, technical, and operational expertise needed to run a truly secure national testing system.

For some analysts, however, the core debate extends far beyond the NTA as an institution. Aiyar argues that the larger issue is not just preventing the next paper leak, but whether a highly centralized national testing system can ever cope with the extreme competition for limited educational opportunities that defines higher education in India. The NTA may be able to implement reforms that make exams more secure, she says, “But it cannot, at least on its own, fix a system where millions of students compete for a tiny number of prestigious seats, and a single exam can make or break an entire young person’s future.”

Many experts agree that meaningful reform must go further than fixing the NTA: India needs a testing system that is less reliant on one-off, high-stakes exams, offers students multiple testing opportunities, and is built to withstand disruptions. Rao says he remains optimistic that the new Nilekani-led task force will deliver actionable changes to close gaps in the current system. But for millions of Indian students, yet another expert committee offers little real reassurance, unless it delivers tangible, visible changes to the system they rely on for their future.

“I’m studying for my university entrance exam next year,” said one 16-year-old 12th grade student. “In the back of my head, I’m already prepared there might be another leak. But what can we do about it? I’ll just keep preparing and hope for the best.”