Advisory & consultancy
Schools with international campuses or ambitions
Every school has an essence: the combination of values, culture and practice that makes it what it is. The best international campuses don't feel like generic schools operating under a borrowed name. They feel like the home school, transplanted.
Achieving that, and protecting it once established, requires clear thinking about what the essence actually is, what it demands of a new campus and team, and what could dilute it. I have written elsewhere on what this means in practice: when a heritage school goes international, style travels easily; substance doesn't.
Before the project begins, I help articulate what must be transposed intact to any international campus and what can be adapted to local context. At founding, I support the selection of investment partners, the design of building and learning environments, the recruitment of leadership and founding teams, and the development of curriculum and staffing models. Once campuses are operating, I work with leadership teams on quality assurance, cross-campus consistency, and ongoing strategic development.
Having Rob in the room meant we were designing for how schools actually run, not just how they look on a plan.
Areas of expertise
Brand and identity
- articulation of educational essence and non-negotiables
- cultural and geographical adaptation
- protection against ethos dilution
School founding
- investment partner selection
- building and learning environment design
- leadership and founding team recruitment
- curriculum and staffing models
Quality and continuity
- educational quality assurance
- cross-campus consistency and standards
- ongoing leadership development and support
Selected essays
On the questions that surface when a school takes its model abroad. You can find more of my thinking on the writing page.
When heritage schools go international, style travels easily. Substance doesn't.
When things go wrong for a school taking its name abroad, it has usually erred towards one of two extremes: licensing the badge and leaving too much of the substance to someone else, or insisting on faithful reproduction of historic institutions that lose their meaning when taken out of the context that formed them. Both leave the new campus carrying a name it cannot live up to, for opposite reasons. My views on what should be transplanted intact, what has to adapt, and what is better left at home.
Read →What Radical Candor taught me about mutual intelligibility
Within a founding team that brings together local staff, expat educators and representatives from the home school, communication styles often vary wildly. One member's obvious implication is another's impenetrable metaphor. A third has relevant experience and strong views but no voice, at least around the meeting table. How I used a training session on Radical Candor to better understand a new team and help them get to know me.
Read →Today's students can move faster than any before them. We need to raise the bar.
A new campus inherits its curriculum framework from the home school, a state system, an exam board, or (most commonly) a mix of all three. However, it is free of the inertia that stymies change in institutions that have had established methods for decades. Nothing is running yet, so what to keep and what to build differently is still a live question. The case for a total rethink of how we assess students now that AI has closed the gap traditional methods relied on, and why that is easier to design in than to retrofit.
Read →
Start the conversation
Every engagement begins with a conversation to help me understand your context and what you wish to achieve. From there, we can discuss what I can contribute and whether there's potential for a partnership.