Three of Britain's oldest school names now have Indian campuses. Harrow International School opened in Bengaluru in 2023, run by the Amity Education Group. Wellington College International opened a day school in Pune the same year, in partnership with the Unison Group, with boarding due to follow by 2027. Shrewsbury International School inaugurated a 150-acre campus in Bhopal in August 2025, partnered with the Jagran Social Welfare Society. A ground report by ThePrint counted ten more British boarding schools already on the way to India.
Parents are paying accordingly — ThePrint's reporting put fees at upward of ₹20 lakh a year at these institutions. What almost nobody reports, because almost nobody discloses it, is what the Indian promoter pays the British school for the right to use its name in the first place.
What the Deal Structure Actually Looks Like
Even without specific figures, the mechanics of how these licensing arrangements work are well understood in the international schools sector. A UK law firm's published analysis of the school franchise model describes the standard shape: the originating school licenses its brand, provides quality assurance and curriculum direction, and supports teacher training — while the local operator builds and runs the actual campus. In exchange, the originating school typically earns an initial fee, ongoing royalties or service fees, training revenue, and sometimes separate consultancy or inspection fees on top.
That's the general shape. The specific numbers — what percentage, what fixed fee, how it scales with enrolment or revenue — are exactly what gets negotiated privately in each individual agreement, and exactly what none of the three India deals above have made public.
What We Can Actually Measure: the Scale of the Trend
If the per-deal economics are opaque, the aggregate picture is not. A study by the University of Manchester for the Private Education Policy Forum found that UK schools' profit from overseas campuses increased eighteen-fold over a decade, reaching £29 million in 2022–23. The same study counted 151 satellite campuses globally in 2024–25, up from 51 in 2017–18 — roughly triple in under a decade. Industry commentary attributes some of the recent acceleration to the UK's 20% VAT on domestic independent school fees, which has pushed some British schools to look harder at overseas licensing as a growth line rather than a side project.
None of that tells you what Harrow charged Amity, or what Wellington charged Unison. But it tells you this has stopped being a handful of one-off prestige partnerships and become a genuine, scaling revenue model for UK schools — which is itself relevant to how seriously an Indian promoter should take the negotiation, since the UK side increasingly has real institutional infrastructure and precedent behind these deals, not a one-time favour to a single overseas partner.
What This Means If You're Evaluating One of These Partnerships
For an Indian promoter or investor considering a similar brand-licensing arrangement — or evaluating an existing one as part of an acquisition — the lesson isn't "here's the going rate." It's that the going rate doesn't exist as a public benchmark, which makes the actual negotiated terms far more consequential than they might first appear:
- Fee structure matters more than fee size. A fixed annual fee, a revenue-percentage royalty, and a per-student fee create very different risk exposure as a school scales from its first cohort to full capacity — and this is precisely the kind of term that won't show up in any press release.
- What exactly is being licensed needs to be explicit. Brand and reputation alone are different from brand plus curriculum plus ongoing quality oversight plus teacher training access — and the latter is worth materially more, and should cost accordingly.
- Term length and exit terms deserve as much attention as the fee itself. What happens to the licence, the brand rights, and the existing cohort of enrolled students if either side wants out is a due-diligence question in its own right, not a footnote.
Evaluating a brand-licensing or franchise arrangement with a foreign school?
MAS Advisory helps Indian promoters and investors structure and negotiate these agreements directly — talk to us before signing, not after.
Based on reporting by ThePrint (October 2025 ground report on British boarding schools in India), official announcements from Wellington College, Harrow International School and Shrewsbury International School's India partners, a published legal analysis of the international school franchise model by Fieldfisher, and a University of Manchester study for the Private Education Policy Forum on UK schools' overseas campus profitability. General guidance only — deal terms for any specific institution should be confirmed directly, not assumed from industry-wide patterns.