The instinct when a global school brand wants to enter India is to imagine a familiar playbook: license the name, build a flagship campus, open the doors. Two of the largest international school groups in the world — one that has already done exactly this in India, one that is doing it right now — both took a different route. Neither built its Indian presence from a blank site. Both routed through something that already worked.
The Acquisition Route: Nord Anglia and Oakridge
Oakridge International School's story starts in 2001, in rented premises in Hyderabad's Jubilee Hills, founded by educationist Shomie Das alongside two ISB alumni, Naga Tummala and Raj Yarlagadda. The following year it moved to a purpose-built 10.5-acre campus. Over the next 18 years, entirely under Indian ownership and management, it grew organically — a Bachupally campus in 2009, a Bengaluru campus around 2013, further sites in Visakhapatnam and Mohali. By 2019, it was five campuses and a genuinely established regional brand, built the slow way.
The evidence that this combination has actually worked, rather than just closed, is specific and recent. As of 2025 reporting, Oakridge's Grade 10 students have outperformed the global IB MYP average for eight straight years running — a streak that predates the acquisition and has continued through it. Teachers now travel to MIT for faculty development as part of Nord Anglia's global network. Student-led events have scaled meaningfully: Codefest, the school's overnight hackathon, drew more than 100 participants for its eighth edition; OAK MUN reached its tenth edition in 2025 with regional diplomatic engagement across Southeast Asia. None of this reads like a foreign owner running a local school into a generic template — it reads like local strength given more resources to build on.
The Partnership Route: GEMS Education's Different Answer
GEMS Education offers a genuinely different model, not a smaller version of the same one. Founded in Dubai in 1959 by the Varkey family — a family of teachers, not investors — GEMS has grown into the world's largest private K-12 education provider by revenue, with well over 150,000 students across multiple countries. GEMS first entered India in 2007 and grew to more than 20 schools by 2010. But its current, more deliberate India strategy looks structurally different from Nord Anglia's approach to Oakridge: GEMS owns only two schools outright in India today — GEMS Modern Academy in Kochi and GEMS International School in Gurgaon. The bulk of its current India growth runs through what the company calls a school collaboration model.
Two Strategies, One Shared Discipline
Nord Anglia bought outright. GEMS mostly partners without buying. On the surface those look like opposite strategies — and in structuring terms, they are. But underneath the difference is a discipline both groups share, and it's the one that actually matters: neither treated India as a market to enter from zero. Both looked for institutions that had already proven themselves with Indian families, in the Indian regulatory and cultural context, over years — and then added global resources to something that was already working, rather than replacing it.
That's a materially different starting point from the international branch campus story we covered in the first article in this series, where a foreign university enters directly under its own name and has to build local trust from a standing start. K-12 education in India runs on a different kind of trust — parents are making a 12-to-15-year decision for their child, usually anchored in word of mouth, board results and a school's actual standing in its own city. That trust is extremely hard for an outside brand to manufacture quickly, and both Nord Anglia and GEMS appear to have recognised this and built their India strategies around acquiring or amplifying it rather than trying to import it.
MAS Advisory's View: What This Means for the Next Entrant
The analysis above is descriptive. What follows is our own advisory judgment, drawn from structuring work in this exact space — offered as a point of view, not further evidence.
1. Start the search with schools, not sites. A foreign group's first India decision usually shouldn't be where to build — it should be which existing, well-regarded local school is the right foundation to build on. The site-selection process most groups start with is, in our view, usually the wrong first question.
2. Decide deliberately between owning and partnering — and be honest about what each demands. Acquisition, as Nord Anglia showed with Oakridge, gives full control over brand, standards and pace, but requires real conviction in the target and a willingness to write a large, binding cheque. GEMS's collaboration model demands less capital and moves faster across more schools, but requires genuine comfort with a local partner's brand staying dominant, and a management structure that can enforce quality without ownership. Choosing between these because one feels more familiar, rather than because it fits the group's actual goals, is a common and avoidable mistake.
3. Protect what made the target school work in the first place. Oakridge's eight-year IB MYP outperformance streak began before its acquisition and continued after — a sign, in our reading, that Nord Anglia added resources without disrupting the academic culture that was already producing results. Any acquiring or partnering group should treat that continuity as the actual success metric in the first two to three years, not enrolment growth or campus count.
4. Use the global network for what a standalone Indian school genuinely can't build alone. Faculty access to MIT-level development, cross-border student programming, curriculum benchmarking against a 30-country network — these are the parts of a global affiliation an Indian promoter cannot easily replicate independently, and they're also the parts most visible to parents evaluating a school's real value beyond its name. We'd treat this as the core of the pitch to both regulators and families, not the brand name on the gate.
5. Expect the deal structure to take real work, not just capital. Both the acquisition and the collaboration model require getting India's school-ownership rules right from the outset — most Indian schools operate under not-for-profit trusts or societies, which shapes exactly what a foreign group can and can't acquire, own or control directly. We've written separately about the real exceptions to that rule and about how these structures are typically built — getting this wrong early is the single most common reason a promising school partnership stalls before it starts.
We've since gone deeper on the higher-education side of this series in how GIFT City's international branch campus model compares to Dubai's own financial-centre talent pipeline.
Evaluating an India entry or school partnership?
MAS Advisory helps identify the right local foundation and structure the ownership or partnership model around it — whether that means acquisition, management collaboration, or something in between.
Factual account based on public reporting including Wikipedia, The News Minute, Start-Up Hyderabad and CBInsights on Oakridge International School and its 2019 acquisition by Nord Anglia Education; EQT's official announcement and Gulf News on Nord Anglia's 2025 acquisition; and Grokipedia, Forbes, Careers360 and CVC Capital Partners' official materials on GEMS Education's history and current India strategy, including a direct quote from GEMS Education India's Executive Director Francis Joseph. The "MAS Advisory's View" section is our own professional judgment and recommendation, not an extension of the sourced reporting above it. General guidance only — outcomes reflect a combination of factors specific to each institution and transaction.