On March 20, 2025, a Swedish private equity firm called EQT announced the completion of a $14.5 billion transaction. They had assembled a consortium of global investors, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Neuberger Berman Private Markets, Corporación Financiera Alba of Spain, Dubai Holding Investments, and bought a company called Nord Anglia Education.
Nord Anglia operates one of the largest school networks in the world. The acquisition announcement described more than 80 schools in 33 countries and more than 90,000 students. Nord Anglia’s own current network pages now describe 89 schools in 37 countries and more than 100,000 students worldwide. Its Asian schools include some of the most expensive and well-known international schools in the region: The British International School Ho Chi Minh City, The British International School Hanoi, Regents International School Pattaya, and several other premium campuses across Southeast Asia.
If you are a British parent paying £25,000 a year in fees for your child to attend one of these schools, your monthly direct debit is going, ultimately, to fund the retirement of Canadian public-sector workers, the returns of a Swedish private equity fund, and the diversified portfolio of a Spanish industrial holding company controlled by the March family of Mallorca.
This is the structural truth of the international schools market in Asia in 2026. It is no longer an education sector. It is an asset class. And the consequences for parents are not always obvious from the school’s website.
The Nord Anglia story, in numbers
The Nord Anglia transaction is the headline event, so let’s understand it properly.
EQT first invested in Nord Anglia in 2008, when the company was small and largely UK-based. At that point Nord Anglia was an interesting niche bet on premium international education. Over the next 16 years, EQT used Nord Anglia as a platform to roll up competitor schools across the world.
In 2017, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) joined as a co-investor. Since 2017, Nord Anglia has completed more than 21 acquisitions, swallowing competitor schools across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The company went from a focused British international schools operator to the largest K-12 schools business on the planet.
In late 2024, EQT did what private equity firms do. It sold. The transaction valued Nord Anglia at $14.5 billion, returned approximately $5.4 billion to EQT’s investors in cash, and brought in a new consortium of long-term institutional capital to fund the next stage of growth.
Jack Hennessy, the EQT partner who led the deal, gave perhaps the most revealing single quote of the entire transaction. He told financial media that Nord Anglia, the biggest K-12 school operator in the world, has only about 1.5% market share.
Read that again. The largest international schools operator in the world thinks it has barely started consolidating its market. The acquisition strategy is going to continue, aggressively, for at least another decade. Every parent paying fees at a Nord Anglia school is contributing to a war chest that will buy more schools, in more countries, increasing the market share of one private-equity-backed entity over global premium education.
This is not a hypothetical concern. It is the explicit strategy disclosed in the press releases of the buyers.
The Cognita parallel
If Nord Anglia is the first half of the story, Cognita is the second.
Cognita is one of the largest international schools operators in the world. When Bregal and KKR announced the sale to Jacobs Holding in 2018, they described a group of over 70 schools across 8 countries, educating more than 40,000 children, with around 7,000 teaching and support staff. Cognita’s current own materials now describe 90 schools across 21 countries. Its Southeast Asian footprint includes the St Andrews International School campuses in Thailand, the Australian International School in Singapore, and Stamford American International School in Singapore.
Cognita was founded in 2004 by British private equity firm Bregal Investments, with a single UK school. By 2013, the American buyout giant KKR joined as a 50% shareholder. In September 2018, Bregal and KKR sold Cognita to Jacobs Holding of Switzerland for a reported £2 billion.
Jacobs Holding is the family office of the heirs of Klaus Jacobs, the late Swiss coffee billionaire whose family fortune was built on Jacobs Suchard, the coffee and chocolate company eventually sold to Philip Morris in 1990. Today Jacobs Holding describes itself as a long-term investor whose sole economic beneficiary is the Jacobs Foundation, a charitable body funding child development research.
Here is where it gets interesting. Cognita has also been through the language and machinery of strategic options. In 2024, Mergermarket reported that Jacobs Holding was reviewing options including a full sale, a minority stake sale, a co-control deal, or an equity syndicate. Reuters also reported a separate stake-sale process that year. Cognita’s own current ownership page describes Jacobs Holding as majority owner, with BDT & MSD Partners and Sofina as minority owners.
If you are a British parent with a child at St Andrews Bangkok or the Australian International School Singapore, the point is not that your campus is about to change hands tomorrow. The point is that your child’s school sits inside an investment structure where majority owners, minority owners, advisers, stake sales and strategic options can shape the direction of the school for years to come.
Why this matters: the three consequences
The structural ownership of international schools by private equity and pension funds has three direct consequences for parents.
One: fees rise faster than local inflation.
Private equity owners need returns. Those returns are paid for, ultimately, by school fee inflation. Across major international schools in Asia, fee inflation has run at 5-7% per year consistently for the last decade, while Asian local inflation has averaged 1-3% over the same period. The compounding effect is significant. A child entering Year 1 in 2018 at £18,000 per year is now in Year 9 at £28,000 per year. That is not just inflation. That is the schools using their pricing power, supported by their consolidated market position, to extract more value from a captive parent base.
For a British family with two children at international school for 12 years each, the total fee outlay typically runs to £500,000-£800,000 in 2026 prices, with the trajectory clearly pointing higher. This is one of the largest financial commitments any expat family will make, and the dynamics behind it are entirely controlled by institutional investors in London, Zurich, Toronto, and Stockholm.
Two: schools open and close on financial timetables, not educational ones.
When a school is owned by a private equity firm with a typical 5-10 year hold period, decisions about expansion, contraction, and closure are made by reference to financial performance, not local educational need. Nord Anglia has expanded aggressively through acquisition and platform growth. Some acquired schools involve rebranding, curriculum changes, fee restructuring, and in some cases, location changes. Parents who chose a school for its specific character, headteacher, or community can find that the school they bought into changes substantially within a few years.
The opposite happens too. Schools that don’t meet financial targets get closed. Several smaller international schools across Asia have closed in the last decade, sometimes with relatively short notice to parents, because the financial model no longer worked for the owners. Your child’s school is one private equity strategy review away from being restructured or sold to another buyer with different priorities.
Three: the educational mission is increasingly financialised.
This is the most uncomfortable consequence. International schools were originally founded, mostly in the 1950s through 1980s, as community institutions serving expatriate families and providing premium education to local elites. They were schools first, businesses second.
The current ownership structure inverts this. They are now businesses first, schools second. Marketing budgets, brand strategy, “premium positioning,” and customer acquisition language increasingly dominates how these institutions describe themselves. Curriculum decisions are made with one eye on what generates the highest fees, not necessarily what produces the best educational outcomes.
Talk to teachers who have worked at these schools for more than a decade and you will hear the same story repeatedly. The schools have changed. The atmosphere has changed. The decision-making has shifted from the headteacher’s office to the regional CEO’s office, which reports to a global CEO, who reports to the private equity board. Educational decisions are now business decisions, and parents have very little visibility into how those decisions are made.
The hidden ownership map
Most parents have no idea who owns their child’s school. The school’s website talks about the headteacher, the values, the curriculum, the facilities. It rarely mentions that the school is one of 80+ in a global private equity-backed network whose primary stakeholder is a Canadian pension fund.
For British parents in Southeast Asia in 2026, here is the rough ownership map of the most popular international schools:
Nord Anglia Education (EQT, CPP Investments, Neuberger Berman, CF Alba, Dubai Holding): British International School Bangkok, British International School Hanoi, British International School Ho Chi Minh City, Regents International School Pattaya, plus schools in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and others.
Cognita (Jacobs Holding majority owner, with BDT & MSD Partners and Sofina as minority owners): St Andrews International School Bangkok (multiple campuses), St Andrews International School Green Valley (Eastern Thailand), Australian International School Singapore, Stamford American International School Singapore. Cognita’s owners have also been through reported strategic-option and stake-sale discussions, which is exactly the sort of ownership process parents rarely notice until it affects the school.
Inspired Education Group (Stonepeak Partners, TA Associates, Oakley Capital): ICS Inter-Community School Zurich (not Asia but indicative of the same model), and a growing portfolio of Asian schools through acquisitions.
Independent and not-for-profit (rare and shrinking): Bangkok Patana School (British, established 1957, run as a non-profit foundation), Tanglin Trust School Singapore (British, non-profit), Singapore American School (American, non-profit), United World College of South East Asia (UWCSEA, non-profit), most local-origin international schools that have resisted acquisition.
The non-profit and independent schools are an increasingly rare category. Bangkok Patana is one of the few major international schools in Southeast Asia that has remained a not-for-profit foundation, and its fee structure reflects that. It charges premium fees because it’s an excellent school, but its surplus reinvests into the institution rather than flowing out as returns to shareholders. Tanglin Trust operates on a similar basis in Singapore.
If you have a choice between sending your child to a private-equity-owned school or a non-profit school of comparable quality, the non-profit will almost always be the better long-term value. The fee inflation will be slower, the educational mission will be more stable, and your money is not, ultimately, funding the retirement of Canadian public-sector workers.
What parents can actually do
The structural situation is not something individual parents can change. The international schools market in Asia is consolidating into a small number of private-equity-owned giants, and that consolidation is going to continue for at least another decade.
What parents can do is make informed choices and protect themselves financially.
Ask who owns the school. Before enrolling, look up the parent company and its ownership structure. If the website doesn’t make this clear (most don’t), search for the school name plus “owned by” or “parent company” plus “private equity” or “acquisition.” The information is publicly available, but the schools don’t advertise it.
Compare fee inflation across schools. Look at the published fee schedule for the last five years. If fees have risen by more than 6% annually, you are paying for consolidation premium. Schools with slower fee inflation are usually independent or non-profit.
Factor in capital contributions and debentures. We will cover the £2 million Hong Kong school debenture story in a separate piece, but for now know that several major international schools require large refundable capital contributions on top of annual fees. A typical Hong Kong international school debenture in 2026 runs £60,000-£100,000 per child, refundable when the child leaves. Bangkok schools charge entrance fees of 250,000-500,000 baht (£5,800-£11,600) that are not refundable. These costs are often invisible at the marketing stage.
Build flexibility into the family financial plan. International school fees rise faster than expat salary inflation. If you commit to private equity-owned international school education for a 12-year period, budget for fees to roughly double in real terms over that period. Many British expat families have been caught out by fee inflation that outpaced their income, forcing children to move schools mid-education.
Consider the alternatives seriously. The British curriculum is also available through reputable Asian local-origin international schools, some bilingual schools, and through homeschooling or online programmes for older students. None of these alternatives are perfect, but in some cases they offer 30-50% cost savings vs the private-equity-owned premium schools, with educational outcomes that are surprisingly competitive.
The takeaway
The international schools market in Southeast Asia has been quietly captured by global institutional capital. Canadian pensioners, Swiss family offices, Swedish private equity, and Spanish industrial dynasties now own the schools that British expat families pay £20,000-£30,000 a year to attend. Most parents have no idea this is the case, because the schools don’t advertise it.
The consequences are real. Fees rise faster than inflation. Schools restructure on financial timetables. Educational decisions get made in boardrooms far from the children involved. The fee outlay over a full education runs to half a million pounds or more, almost all of it ultimately flowing to financial returns for those institutional owners.
The remaining independent and non-profit schools, Bangkok Patana, Tanglin Trust, UWCSEA, Singapore American School, are an increasingly precious resource. If you have access to one of them, value it. Their independence is the exception now, not the rule.
In the next pieces in this pillar, we will go deeper into the maths. What does a full British international education actually cost across Bangkok, Hanoi, and Singapore? Why are the teachers earning so much less than the school revenue would suggest? What is the £2 million Hong Kong debenture story and how did parents come to accept that as normal? How are local Asian families now dominating “international” schools?
But the foundation is here. Before you choose a school, know who owns it. That single piece of due diligence will change how you read everything else.
