Racial capitalism and the ordinary extractivism of British elite schools overseas

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the relationship between elite British boarding schools and the overseas branches (‘satellites’) that they have established around the world. While British schools are categorised as charities, the satellites are operated as commercial ventures through subsidiaries. The UK-based schools can thus profit from the export of their ‘brands’, extracting capital from their satellites overseas and channelling it back to the UK. Drawing on interviews with staff of these satellite schools and on documentary analysis (including Charity Commission reports), we use the lens of racial capitalism to analyse the relationships between British elite schools and their overseas branches. We argue that through their overseas operations, British elite schools engage in extractive practices and are complicit in processes of enclosure and dispossession. These processes are premised along racialised lines and ultimately ensure that the promised ‘British eliteness’ remains out of reach for those who subsidise its social reproduction.

KEYWORDS:

• Elite schools
• British international schools
• racial capitalism
• extractivism

Introduction

Elite schools play a central role in the naturalisation of economic privilege and its transmutation into seemingly inherent qualities, hiding the role that wealth plays in their success and that of their students (Bourdieu, 1996). Therefore, while examinations of culture and socialisation in elite schools are important, we should not lose sight of what elite schools are trying to hide: money, and where it comes from.

This article takes as its starting point the money that flows from schools in China, Southeast Asia and the Middle East into the coffers of elite boarding schools in the UK. Despite their large endowments, significant income, and the limited number of individuals who benefit from their services, private independent schools (which are counterintuitively called ‘public schools’ in England and Wales, henceforth ‘Public Schools’¹) are governed by the Charities Act (2011). As such, they enjoy a favourable tax regime, provided they can demonstrate that they engage in activities that provide ‘public benefit’ (James, Boden, & Kenway, 2022). Over the last few decades, some prominent schools have found new sources of income in their overseas ‘satellite’ schools. The emergence of these overseas branches is closely connected to the expansion of global capitalism: the commodification of education and with it, that of school names-turned-brands; the promotion of ‘British’ education overseas as part of nation-branding; and the expansion and diversification of the Global Education Industry (GEI) (Bunnell, Courtois, & Donnelly, 2020). As part of this phenomenon, elite British boarding schools like Harrow, Dulwich, Wellington, Brighton, or Repton are licensing the use of their names (which we will refer to as ‘brands’ since it is indeed their use in this context) through subsidiaries partnered with GEI giants such as Amity and Pearson (Harrow) or local or multinational corporations like Bloom Holdings² (Brighton).

The rapid spread of English-medium international schools has drawn criticism. Researchers have explicitly applied the lenses of postcolonialism, whiteness and/or extractivism to analyse how these schools export Western values and brand them as superior to local cultures, while exploiting local staff, students and resources (Angod, 2015; Bolay & Rey, 2021; Gardner-McTaggart, 2021; Gibson & Bailey, 2023; Koh & Sin, 2021; van Oord, 2007; see also the newly formed ODIS network³). In parallel, the development of elite schools in former British colonies and elsewhere has also been analysed as a (post)colonial phenomenon (Angod & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2019; Ayling, 2016; Courtois, 2018; Kenway et al., 2017; Sandgren, 2017).

Typically, satellites use the name and crest of the original British school and import at least some of its organisational features and vocabulary (‘houses’; ‘prefects’). Some satellites replicate the originals’ layout and architecture. Most teach a British curriculum; some offer the IB (International Baccalaureate); English is either the sole or one of two languages of instruction. Like other international schools, they have a propensity for hiring white, Anglo-Saxon teaching staff (Rey, Bolay, & Gez, 2020). As such, satellite schools appear to be explicit instances of post-colonialism in education. In addition, beyond the promotion of Western values, language and educational forms, these schools engage in a specific form of capitalist extraction whereby money is extracted from predominantly non-white families in China, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and channelled back to the UK to boost the finances of institutions historically serving a white, wealthy British elite. In the same way that UK-based (and Irish-based) elite schools tend to ‘hide’ their international intake (Brooks & Waters, 2015; Courtois, 2016), we show in this paper that they have an equivocal relationship with their satellites, that sometimes includes side-lining overseas students and staff. By doing so, the UK schools are also hiding one of the bases of their wealth.

As historians Ciaran O’Neill and Petter Sandgren remind us, the ‘franchising’ of Western elite educational ‘brands’ is not a new phenomenon – the Benedictine and Jesuit model being among many examples (O’Neill & Sandgren, 2019). In more recent times, the commodification of education and political influence of GEI actors have made possible the expansion of education chains into the Global South, where their presence is justified as a service to poorer nations, conveniently side-stepping their enormous profits gained in the process (Srivastana, 2016). In relation to China, Southeast Asia and the Middle East more specifically, the growth of expensive, extractive forms of English-medium ‘international’ schooling has been normalised as a response to local demand and in particular, the ambitions of an aspiring ‘global middle class’ (Ball & Nikita, 2014; Wright & Lee, 2019).

The paper uses the lens of racial capitalism (Gerrard, Sriprakash, & Rudolph, 2021; Robinson, 2020) to disrupt existing narratives of supply and demand and critically analyse the relationship between the satellites and their ‘mother’ schools as well as the repertoires of justification at play. Following racial capitalism, we argue that through their overseas operations, British elite schools engage in extractive practices and are complicit in processes of enclosure and dispossession. These processes are legitimised by racialised discourses and ultimately ensure that the promised ‘British eliteness’ remains out of reach for those who subsidise its social reproduction.

‘International education’: elite schools, postcolonialism and racial capitalism

Robinson (2020) wrote about ‘racial capitalism’ to describe the racialisation that permeates social structures deriving from Western conceptions of capitalism. As Melamed (2015) points out ‘capitalism is racial capitalism’, recognising how production (and reification) of difference goes hand-in-hand with processes of capitalism. Processes of racialisation and capitalism are never separable from each other (Amin, 2018; Virdee, 2019). The process of capital accumulation moves through unequal social relations, solidifying racial inequalities that are necessary for the functioning of capital (Melamed, 2015). Those writing on racial capitalism describe how racism is expressed through the way capitalism differentiates between social groups, entities and territories, with ideological justifications given of different human capacities that embed racial inequality within the structures of capitalism. Whilst slavery, segregation, colonialism, white supremacism, and the exploitation of migrants are often regarded as stark examples of racial capitalism, it is also embedded within contemporary inclusion agendas which sanitise unequal social relations (Melamed, 2015).

Recent work has begun to focus on how education is constitutive of racial capitalism and helps to reproduce racial inequalities through educational structures, systems and practices (Gerrard et al., 2021; Morales-Doyle & Gutstein, 2019; Webb, 2021). Gerrard et al.’s (2021) work is helpful in discerning three modes by which racial capitalism manifests itself within education; these include enclosing/ dispossessing, dividing labour, and the extraction of value. First and foremost, racial capitalism is based on the appropriation of land, which displaces existing communities. Processes of enclosure and dispossession are also visible in the valorisation and disavowal of cultures, ways of knowing, languages, and knowledge(s). Education systems are sites of enclosure, their core purpose is to induct people and groups into cultures and knowledges worth knowing, and in doing so to dispossess others. Second, and in turn, Gerrard et al. (2021) point out that capitalist practices of enclosure/dispossession are based on, and contribute to, racialised divisions of labour. This includes the basis upon which educational institutions function, such as racial divisions of labour within hierarchically organised schools and universities as well as how education systems serve to reproduce the same divided labour force. Third, Gerrard et al. (2021) contend that education is fundamentally a process of extracting value (through enclosure/dispossession and dividing labour) and there is no end to the ascription of value possible through educational practices. They give the examples of credentials, data, buildings, curricula. Even value is extracted from the ‘diversity work’ of institutions and discourses of diversity embedded within equality and diversity initiatives, invariably carried out by people of colour, but which do little to alter systemic racial inequalities that universities and other educational institutions are built upon. Gerrard et al.’s (2021) conceptual analysis points to avenues of empirical enquiry where racial capitalism can be fruitfully deployed, especially in relation to student debt, curricula, and the division of labour. For example, Webb’s (2021) work focuses on the role of debt, as a crucial feature of racial capitalist structure, in the lives of Black working class young people in South Africa. Morales-Doyle and Gutstein (2019) examine the way STEM education privileges corporate interests and is complicit in the preparation of a racially stratified labour force.

At its core, the elite education project is a colonial one: not only because historically elite schools aimed to produce colonial administrators and other keepers of the racialised capitalist order, but also and especially because the co-construction of eliteness and whiteness is at the centre of their project (Ayling, 2019; Gatzambide-Fernandez & Angod, 2019). This co-construction is discernible in the way international schools operate. Bolay and Rey (2021) describe international schools as ‘enclaves’ demarcated and protected from their immediate environment by high fences and other security mechanisms which, following the logics of settler colonialism, construct the outside as wild and menacing (p. 10). The postcolonial logics of international education, with its reliance on English and positioning of Western values and language as superior to the local culture, has been analysed by Azzi in Lebanon (2018), Gibson and Bailey in Malaysia (2023), Poonoosamy (2010) in Mauritius, among others. Dugonjic-Rodwin (2022) shows how colonial categories of thinking pervade the IB curriculum despite claims to diversity and inclusion, while Gaztambide-Fernández and Angod (2019) describe the cosmopolitan affect cultivated in elite international schools as a form of whiteness, an entitlement to move through the world, while avoiding accountability for the relations of domination produced by racial capitalism. In relation to the division of labour, the issue of the (racialised) exploitation of workers surfaces in Tarc and Tarc (2015), Rey et al. (2020), Koh and Sin (2021) and Poonoosamy (2010): Heads of school are white; and it is not unusual that white Anglo-Saxon teachers are paid more than local teachers. While the financial exploitation of (racialised) students through the extraction of fees is rarely described in these terms, international education has been described as a highly profitable industry (MacDonald, 2006) and one constantly seeking to expand into new territories (Bunnell, 2022; Kim, 2019; Wu & Koh, 2022 on China) following the logics of global and indeed, racial capitalism. It is also an industry that benefits from the pervasive postcolonial logics shaping aspirations and mobility projects.

We build on these critical analyses of international and elite education as well as on work using the concept of racial capitalism by drawing on it to understand the exportation of elite UK private school brands in the establishment of ‘satellites’ around the world and to analyse their enclosure/dispossession and extractive practices.

Methods

The data we draw upon includes documentary research and interviews. We examined the accounts that a selection of schools submitted to the Charity Commission for the tax year 2019–2020 and gathered information on fees from school websites.

We conducted nine individual semi-structured online interviews, lasting on average an hour each, with staff who had teaching and/or managerial responsibilities in an overseas branch campus school at the time of the interview or shortly before the interview. The project received ethical approval from our institution. Participants were contacted initially through our professional networks, and via snowballing.

Two significant areas of activity for satellite schools (China and Southeast Asia; and the Middle East) and four different ‘brands’ of British elite schools were represented in our sample. In addition, one of our participants had experience across several satellite schools of the same brand, while another had previously worked in the ‘mother’ school. Participants were also familiar with satellites of other brands operating in the areas where they were located. Thus, the interviews allowed us to gain insights into other schools, brands, and the local dynamics between them. All nine participants were British citizens. While their pathways to teaching in overseas satellite schools varied, they were all ‘expatriate’ rather than local teachers. Eight were white and Western, and six were men.

Interview questions focused on the dynamics of the local and international education markets, the relationships and contacts of the satellites with the ‘mother’ schools and with each other, their clienteles, style of education, rituals. We analysed the interview data thematically and collaboratively. As is often the case in educational research, we found that staff who had left were more likely to be critical of their previous institutions. Overall, all were happy to engage in critical conversations about the relationship between their school and the mother school in the UK, and about the social justice implications of their work more broadly. While this may have to do with the social context of interviews with researchers known to at least some of the participants for their critical views of elite schooling, this also aligned with our previous experiences as researchers of elite education (Courtois, 2018; Donnelly, 2014). Our position as white educators may have also facilitated our rapport with participants. Given that all but one of our participants were also white Westerners, it is also conceivable that this could have led participants to talk about local students in exoticising ways. Indeed, this was something that we observed across some of our data.

The name and exact location of the schools are not mentioned. Instead, we call them Brand A, B, C and D, followed by the region where the satellite is located. We use pseudonyms throughout. The schools named in the first section are not necessarily schools where any of our participants worked. Unlinking the financial and legal information in the first section from the interview excerpts in the following sections comes at the expense of detail but is necessary to protect the anonymity of participants, particularly in the context of widespread employment precarity in the sector.

‘Cash cows’? The extractive mechanisms of elite schools’ overseas operations

In the accounts submitted by Harrow to the Charity Commission, the arrangement with its non-charitable trading subsidiary Harrow International School Limited (HISL) is described as follows:

The Harrow International Schools which operate as separate entities under franchise agreements and are independently owned, with HISL licensing the use of the Harrow name and crest. The international schools are expected to operate in a manner which is compatible with Harrow’s ethos and essential values, extend the School’s reputation abroad and to generate income for bursaries in support of the School’s objective to extend the benefits of its education as widely as possible. (Harrow, 2020, p. 6)

Most British schools manage their satellites through subsidiary companies, which sometimes partner with other corporations. The subsidiary collects royalties from the satellites. Typically, royalties consist of a fixed annual fee and a share of the satellites’ total fee income. In 2019–2020, the turnover of HISL, which then oversaw ten schools, exceeded £4.3 million and resulted in a tax-free transfer of £3 million to the ‘Corporation’ (Harrow School and John Lyon School) as a ‘Qualifying Donation under Gift Aid arrangements’.

In 2019–2020, the ‘donation’ received by Brighton from its subsidiary overseeing five schools was £1,523,000. Dulwich received £1,300,000; Wellington received £2,369,000; Cranleigh received £5,245,000 (which included a one-off buy-out of £4,805,000). More modestly, Reigate received £83,942 from its two satellites. For those with five or more satellites, the amount received represented approximately 3% to 5% of their total income as declared in their accounts. As noted by Gamsu (2022, p. 21), while wealthy, these are not the most endowed schools in the independent sector. Therefore, this constitutes a sizeable income for these UK schools. While there are at least 107 British satellite colleges educating over 70,000 students worldwide (ISC, 2023), some of the ‘mother’ schools make no mention of their overseas activities in their accounts. It is therefore difficult to estimate the overall amount of money flowing from satellites back into the UK. Based on the figures above and available enrolment numbers, it could be as high as £300,000 per satellite, which would come at an average of £500 per student enrolled overseas. A recent report estimates the total profit to British schools from their satellites at £98.2 million over a nine-year period (Fryer & Fishwick, 2023).

In its report, Brighton suggests that some of the profit is reinvested in the training of staff and development of the satellites. By contract, Harrow’s report states that the profit is used to finance bursaries for students to attend the UK school, thus enhancing its ‘public benefit activities’ (and legitimating its charity status).⁴ The engagement of elite schools with the Global South, in the form of charity and volunteering, has been described as (post)colonial (Angod, 2015; Kenway & Fahey, 2015). By this process, the direction of charity is reversed: Predominantly non-white and (supposedly) wealthy families in the Global South ‘donate’ money to supposedly poor children in the UK – children not wealthy enough to afford fees of over £40,000.

Another way to objectivise the extraction taking place is to consider the fees charged by the satellites relative to local mean household income. From this perspective, one year at Brighton College Abu Dhabi for a 12-year-old child represents 35% of the median UAE household income; while Dulwich College Seoul charges 70% of the median Korean household income and Dulwich College Singapore 110% of the local median income. Haileybury Astana represents 395% of the Kazakhstan median household income; Reigate Grammar School a staggering 670% of the Vietnamese median household income and Wellington College International Shanghai charges 850% of the Chinese median household income.⁵ In the UK, day fees for Dulwich and Wellington are equivalent to 73% and 99% of the median British household income respectively, while boarding at Harrow is 135%. The median household income measure says little of regional and urban-rural disparities as wide as those found in China. Yet these figures suggest that these schools operate on a different plane, in enclaved microcosms of wealth disconnected (and benefiting) from the lives and realities of large swathes of the population.

Moreover, there is a clear expansionist dimension at the heart of the schools’ overseas strategies, which is also in line with the logics of (racial) capitalism. The number of satellite schools increased from 81 in 2021–107 in 2023 (ISC, 2023), a 32% increase. Satellites are concentrated in China and Southeast Asia (CSA), including 49 in mainland China alone, and the Middle East (ME) but some schools are planning to expand into new territories. For example, Harrow is planning to open new schools in New York and in India; while Haileybury, with schools in Kazakhstan, is planning to open more in Malta, Egypt, and Bangladesh. The British elite school model proved popular in many post-colonial contexts (Kenway & McCarthy, 2016; Sandgren, 2017) but what we see with the satellites is that they are concentrated in areas where global capitalism is particularly active and income inequality high. These new destinations suggest future expansion into lower income countries and former colonies. While it is unclear who these schools will appeal to locally – the fee structures vary significantly across and within brands – it seems clear that their expansion is premised upon a belief in the value to be extracted from their ‘brand’.

The extractive practices of schools are visible to staff on the ground. Both Tracey and Michael used to work in the same Brand A school, where Nadia is still employed. Tracey referred to it as a ‘cash cow’ for the mother school in the UK:

… a lot of the perception of the teachers, um, was that, you know, we were basically the cash cow … the kind of monetary channel to support the mothership, the British school, and really, whilst the ethos was aligned in terms of academic attainment, um, that was about it, from, you know, from my perspective. (Tracey, Brand A, ME)

Michael expressed a similar sentiment:

I almost feel as though they, they literally, separate themselves from their sister schools, take their fees, and make [Brand A] UK, you know, even more beautiful and more wealthy. (Michael, Brand A, ME)

Michael described several of the extractive mechanisms at play. He argued that after a hefty initial investment and effort put into the physical aspect of the school, the finances were gradually tightened (which he blamed on the partner corporation rather than on the ‘mother’ school). The school was deprived of vital funds, while student numbers increased:

… as time progressed, that profit margin was increasingly getting larger, because there was cuts everywhere, you know, the fees and the number of pupils was going up, but the benefits for staff, and children as well, was getting lower and lower … You know, you saw, you look at [Brand A UK] and they’ve got like fifteen-million-pound new buildings, and um, you know, state-of-the-art this, state-of-the-art that, you know, and we’ve barely got enough paper for photocopying. [laughs]

Michael was unhappy with the deterioration of his pay and working conditions and felt that the UK school failed to support teachers at the satellite, ‘because, essentially, we are – teachers are, commodities’. In this, Michael describes a classic case of capitalist extraction that increased overtime and in which workers are dehumanised and commodified. Nadia, for her part, insisted on the lack of ‘interest’ in the satellite on the part of the mother school:

… they want to make sure that their name is being presented favourably so that the school maintains a certain standard and a certain reputation, because that will then impact their reputation. But ultimately, you know if you were to speak to many people at satellite schools … there isn’t really an investment from the school in the UK, you know, they’re not invested in terms of curriculum decisions, staff development, CPD, resources, um, you know, it is more of a financial business arrangement [Interviewer: Right, they’re not invested in the sense that they don’t invest the resources, or? …] No, yeah, they’re not interested, you know. And why would they be? Because they are getting a huge profit in return. (Nadia, Brand A, ME)

This echoes Wu and Koh’s (2022) findings in their study of satellite schools in China, where staff also felt neglected and overlooked by the ‘mother’ schools, suggesting that this is a widespread issue affecting satellites in different parts of the world. This said, there were variations across our sample: Brand A had perhaps the most distant relationship with its satellites out of the four brands, reflective of its arrangement in ‘licensing’ its name only, while the satellites were overseen by a commercial enterprise with no prior background in educational provision. In this case, money was extracted from this satellite not only for the benefit of the UK school but also to increase the profit margin of the ‘partner’ company.

Capitalism, and indeed racial capitalism, operates by connecting people, groups and entities in purely economic terms, negating other forms of connectedness, realities and ‘being’ in the world. In Nadia’s view, this seems to reflect the way the UK public schools view their ventures overseas. The terms of ‘partnerships’ and ‘families’ used in accounts and on websites sanitise what some of our participants described as relationships of exploitation.

Other participants offered more nuanced views. Patrick, a current teacher with managerial responsibilities, did not explicitly object to the nature of the relationship, insisting instead on the support and oversight from the mother school:

… and yeah, of course, I mean, this is the way that some of the private schools are going to stay afloat, isn’t it? They know they need a new stream of revenue and a new stream of students and so, um, that, of course we do send them money and, and we are, although we do have a certain level of autonomy and that’s fine. But they do also provide a lot of support. (Patrick, Brand B, CSA)

In this excerpt, he also minimises the extractive practices at play by presenting them as natural (‘of course we do send them money’). Other participants mentioned that school fees were often paid by the parents’ employers, suggesting the relationship was therefore less exploitative (‘the financial burden is removed to a degree’, Tracey). Indeed, in some of these wealthy and globalised enclaves, multinational companies subsidise school fees for their employees’ children. This, and the involvement of corporate ‘partners’, may conjure up the image of disembodied financial flows circulating between faceless corporations – perhaps staying within the region – and mask the reality of the extraction taking place and the fact it operates largely along racialised lines. In addition, even if some of the profit escapes the UK schools, it is their brand that allows this form of extraction to take place, taking resources away from the locality.

What we have described thus far may sound like ‘business as usual’ in the context of the GEI, and global capitalism more generally. The next section explores the racialisation processes discernible in the way schools frame their activities and overseas clientele.

Racialising discourses of justification

These satellite school ventures are built upon a history of colonialism and the racialised ‘othering’ of countries of the Global South; and this legacy can be seen in how schools sometimes construct and imagine their local non-expatriate intake. The schools are making racialised assumptions about demand for their overseas satellite schools, which stems itself from colonial legacies of value and feeds into racialised capital. In a crowded international school market, they assume that there is huge value to be extracted from the English Public School identity as a symbol of Western-ness and English-ness. Whilst all international schools do this to some extent – with significant pushback from the government in the case of China (Wu & Koh, 2023) – there is a crude overtness in the extraction of value from English Public School names, buildings, imagery and materialities that are replicated overseas. A cornerstone of racial capitalism is its production and normalisation of difference through processes of enclosure and dispossession. The British architecture chosen for this school serves to reproduce the valorisation of British identities and culture as that which is ‘worth knowing’ and at the same time dispossess Global South cultures.

Some of our participants described their local non-expatriate intake in materialistic terms; their choice of the English Public School brand was depicted in shallow ways, choosing the ‘most expensive’ international school not for substantive educational reasons but as a marker of wealth and status:

They look at the clock tower we stick on the front of each of our schools and the colleges and it’s just ‘well it’s just a bit of that foreign architecture’. I mean, they build a whole town modelled, you know, on a British Tudor village or something. And it’s just, yes, it’s a form of aesthetic, it’s attractive, but do they go beyond the facade? No, not really, I don’t think so. I think they want their kids to be able to be international but not perhaps in the same way we would think of international schooling in the traditional sense about you know, global citizenship, cosmopolitanism, all the rest of it. It’s more, ‘we want them to be able to assimilate and function overseas for business’, but they’re always going to be Chinese. (John, Brand B, CSA)

Whether local families are capable of appreciating British and Western educational values beyond their aesthetic charm is also questioned here. John suggests that the Chinese families interested in his school are too materialistic and instrumental to even have genuine cosmopolitan aspirations (that British and Western education systems are assumed to embody). He continues using the trope of the superficial, materialistic nouveau riche:

And I wouldn’t have a sophisticated enough understanding of the whole nouveau riche thing. I mean, it’s there in [country]. You know, some of our parents, they’ve got the Maserati, they’ve got the Gucci bag, they’ve got [Brand B] … So you know, if you collect luxury goods that’s one of the educations you’re going to buy for your kid, if you can. Now do they see beyond that in terms of things values, the philosophy of the education? I don't think so. (John, Brand B, CSA)

Under racial capitalism, ‘education philosophies’ are constitutive of enclosure; the valorising of particular ways of knowing (and dispossession of other possible ways of knowing). The perceived superficiality of local non-expatriates is also evident in how they are regarded as not recognising distinctions between schools in their educational philosophies (themselves artificial instruments of enclosure), in other words the more fine-grained qualities of their pedagogy, curriculum and assessment. Instead, Global South families are supposedly attracted to the ‘bling’ of the English Public School brand.

It is not difficult to imagine that the explicit choice of these schools to replicate their architecture and other forms of materiality is part of an extractive practice grounded in colonialist perceptions of very wealthy local non-expatriates; families who are attracted to symbols of Western wealth (like designer clothing brands, or expensive cars). In this sense the schools are justified in exporting their brands overseas because wealthy families of emerging economies demand it; therefore, they are not exploiting, but rather meeting the demand of a growing middle class in places like China – a typical justification of capitalist extraction as merely responding to consumer desire. But this justification conveniently ignores how the attraction and demand for foreign brands such as the English Public School is itself a post-colonial legacy and is constitutive of racial capitalism. This reinforcement of Englishness as superior also manifests itself in everyday practices and materialities, such as the commodification and extraction of value from British historical figures promoted within the schools:

For the most part not all parents, but many of ours have quite good knowledge of Western culture, Western history, and they do see people like Churchill as being significant figures who have had – Churchill had his issues, of course, but is famous as a successful and prominent leader of a Western country. So, they do, they do buy into that, they do see value in that.

As well as the use of popular Western fiction such as Harry Potter to convince children of the value of the English house system and instil reverence for this imported organisational feature:

And then again, with the house system, again, I might begin by saying that when we first introduced the house system fully … the Head of our school at the time, he actually showed a video of Harry Potter and how the house system worked there … That’s something which the parent can kind of, and students can kind of see, kind of attach, kind of understand the house system through because they’ve all read or seen Harry Potter. They will see the house system is being similar and in some ways it is similar because of, say, the attachment to the house, loyalty and passion for the house and house activities, and so on. (Nathan, ex-Brand C, CSA)

The co-construction of Englishness/Whiteness and eliteness, and the injunction to ‘approximate whiteness’ (Gaztambide-Fernández & Angod, 2019) appear to be explicit and deliberate. The perceived huge wealth of local non-expatriate families and supposed disregard for substantive educational experiences of growth, learning and personal development was often alluded to. There was an impression that these schools are serving crass and materialistic locals. A participant in the Middle East talked about non-expatriate children as ‘spoilt’ and not holding the same ‘aspirations’ as expatriate pupils at the school:

I would say the – probably, the main difference is we had a lot of incredibly wealthy, um, locals … I’ve taught a few princesses and sheikhs, and, um, they, that seems to be the only difference between them really, you know, they were incredibly wealthy. You know, let’s send our children to the most expensive, because that’s going to be the best education for my child. And, yeah, I think that’s been pretty much it really, because I think a lot of those children who we had, that were locals, um, they didn’t have the same aspirations in them, like what the European, and American and British kids had in them. I think they were so spoilt at home, they just didn’t have any aspirations at all. (Paul, ex-Brand A, ME)

In what follows, Paul constructs a binary opposition between a (supposedly Western, ‘expatriate’) child able to give a sophisticated and reflexive answer to a question on their future aspirations, and a (in this instance, non-white, Middle Eastern) local child unable to articulate anything at all, while also being disparaging of white students in UK state schools:

You know, one thing I did find bizarre was that you could ask somebody who was in Year 7 or Year 8, ‘what would you like to do when you leave school?’, and they will tell you the routes that they want to go down in terms of university, and they want to do this job because, you know, this person in my family has done it, and, you know, they love their job, and they can give you so much insight as to how they’ve thought about their lives, and whether that’s parental influence or that’s just what they want to do. Whereas, a lot of the local kids, ‘what do you wanna do when you leave school?’, ‘I don’t know’ … it was very much a state school, white child in the UK. You know, that’s the kind of response that they would give you.

When prompted further, Paul suggested that despite having high-earning jobs, expat families did not ‘spoil’ their children, encouraging them to study instead, while the local children were given ‘Xboxes and PlayStations’ and neglected their homework as a result:

… I guess, I think it’s just, it all comes down to your parents because, at the end of the day, you know, I still tutor individuals’ kids, in [City] and, you know, they’re neurosurgeons and solicitors, and they’ve all got fantastic jobs, so they could spoil their children incredibly so, and they don’t … Very few kids out there have, you know, Xboxes and PlayStations and all of this, because all of their evenings were spent studying. Whereas the local kids, they all had their Xboxes and, you know, all their things to fill their time outside of school other than doing their homework. (Paul)

The binary opposition constructed by Paul is reminiscent of Bourdieu’s argument that a chiastic structure existed in 1970s French society, opposing two segments of the middle classes: those with high economic capital and (relatively) low cultural capital on the one hand (small and medium company owners for example), and those with high cultural capital and (relatively) low economic capital on the other (such as teachers). However, in this case, the binary opposition is also racialised: the non-white locals are those who spoil their children with the clichéd ‘Xboxes and PlayStations’, while the expats are highly skilled professionals (‘neurosurgeons and solicitors’) who would rather cultivate asceticism and intellectualism in their children.

Furthermore, these recurring mentions of the locals’ wealth shift the focus away from the extreme levels of income of inequality that exist in the UK, and the fact that UK schools do not close their doors to the extremely wealthy. The fact that the schools participate in, profit from and even in a way, lead, this amplification of inequality on the local level is also silenced. Thus, depicting the local clientele as materialistic allows materialism to change sides – distracting from the fact that the UK schools and their satellites engage in materialism and capitalist extraction.

Maintaining racialised hierarchies

Racialised capital operates through the construction of difference and normalisation of hierarchies of difference, with education and schooling ripe for the proliferation of differentiated hierarchies. Indeed, their interruption into local education markets within Global South cities is expanding further the array of Western educational goods of differentiated value. Postcolonial critiques of the spread of ‘international’ education have argued that this phenomenon places Western culture and knowledge traditions above their non-Western counterparts in a hierarchy of value (Azzi, 2018; van Oord, 2007). This is amplified and complicated in contexts where satellite schools emerge as younger, less authentic, or even ‘bling’ versions of explicitly elite British institutions. As mentioned above, the relationship between the UK-based school and its satellites is not one of mutual exchange or cooperation between equals. In cases where the founding school effectively supports the satellite, this is used to justify the financial extraction taking place and positions the founding school as a consultant or expert in educational matters, and the satellite as a somehow inferior school in need of guidance. The extraction is not only material but also symbolic and seems to reinforce a (racialised) hierarchy between the founding schools and the satellites.

Another scenario is where there is little contact between the founding school and the branches. In one case, a participant referred to the partner company as a ‘buffer’, which emphasised how evident the demarcation between the UK ‘mother’ school and its satellites was. The majority of the teachers we spoke to reported experiencing little engagement from their ‘mother’ school on matters of curriculum, school practices, alumni relations/networks, teacher professional development; with no possibility of staff or students transferring to the UK school. A teacher at a Brand D satellite spoke about how they sometimes had to ‘tactfully’ explain to parents that their child would not be able to transfer to the UK ‘mother’ school and that instead they would have to undergo the same application process and entry examinations as outsiders. As noted by Wu and Koh (2022), the Public School brand serves to make parents believe that the satellite will provide the same opportunities as the founding school would. Here, we see that this belief is so strong – and legitimate – that the disappointing reality needs to be explained ‘tactfully’. As it turns out, the satellite is not even a steppingstone for entry into the ‘real’ elite school in the UK.

When collaboration did happen between the ‘mother’ and satellites, it was rarely characterised as authentic or meaningful. For example:

They are slowly starting to build more and more – they call it leadership but more and more student collaboration stuff, but I still feel it’s largely – again, it’s one of those things, it’s largely symbolic. You know, I mean, the group brands itself as, quote, ‘a family of schools’ … I get a sense in which [staff in the UK school] have a pretty skewed and rather stuffy view … I think [the Master of the UK school] even referred to [the satellites] as their Commonwealth at one point and that kind of says it all really in terms of where he’s coming from … [Interviewer: What do you think he meant when he said, Commonwealth?] Well, it felt pretty patronising. [Interviewer: What did he mean by that though? I don't understand.] I guess I don’t know … I take it to mean those are our little friends over there. And you know, there’s not a massive amount of interest to see what we’re doing in terms of educational innovation, for example, because there’s an air of patronage about the way in which we’re looked upon and treated. (Nathan, Brand B)

This gives some indication about how the satellites were positioned in the eyes of those working in the ‘mother’ school, despite sharing the same name. Similar attitudes were reported not only from leaders, but also from ordinary teachers being approached by colleagues in the satellites:

And I always find it interesting as well, if you go on the Facebook accounts of these schools, so you’ve got your [Brand A satellites in the ME], all the sister schools will share the success of [Brand A UK], and promote, obviously, [Brand A UK] … [Brand A UK] never ever, ever shares anything about their sister schools. And I find that odd from a social media perspective. (Paul, Brand A)

The division is clear to see here; whilst their satellites are looking up to, and celebrating, the UK ‘mother’ school, there is no celebration or even acknowledgement of the satellites in return. This echoes the findings of Brooks and Waters (2015) who found that the overseas satellites were largely hidden from the online marketing material of elite UK schools and were restricted to separate ‘international’ sections of the schools’ websites. But it also speaks to the hierarchical positioning of these entities. While the satellites may be very good schools in their own right, in these relationships they are positioned on a different plane to their UK namesake, maintaining the UK school as the authentic version, and the satellites a fake, much like the fakes that exist of designer clothing. In line with racial capitalism, this hierarchical structuring is a racial hierarchy, with racialisation permeating the relational positioning of Global North and Global South schools, concomitantly maintaining and reinforcing the idea of eliteness with Englishness/whiteness (Gaztambide-Fernández & Angod, 2019).

Crucially, a cornerstone of racial capitalism in education is the way educational systems and institutions are complicit in maintaining broader racial stratification within society, especially the labour market. In a way, all staff attached to the satellite effectively work for the founding school as value is extracted from their labour as well as from the parents’ labour when these pay school fees. But there are implications beyond the schools as well. A long-standing literature has evidenced the extent and nature of racial inequalities in the labour market. In the UK context, for example, this work has demonstrated that Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups are more likely to experience long-term unemployment and be under-represented within managerial and professional occupations (Khattab & Modood, 2015). Donnelly and Gamsu (2019) found that ethnic minority graduates were much less likely to secure the top high-paying positions in the finance and consultancy sectors. Drawing on survey data of 11,000 graduates, the study showed that ethnic minority graduates were equally likely to get recruited to these elite firms as their white counterparts, but they were more likely to be placed in the lower paid roles outside of London. This represented a two-tier recruitment track mapping neatly on to the racially stratified labour market that is characteristic of racial capitalism, even within these elite firms. We can see this same process of bifurcation across the different schools of the elite Public School brands – the same school ‘brand’ with its largely white and dominant UK school, and its subjugated overseas non-white version that is not legitimately elite. As noted by Reeves, Friedman, Rahal, and Flemmen (2017), it is only a small subset of Public Schools that gives access to the top political and economic positions, as a hierarchy typically orders different groups of elite schools (Courtois, 2020). We can imagine how this differentiation between the founding school and its overseas satellites likely spills over into the labour market – maintaining its racial stratification – through the differential currency the versions of the school brand carries – potentially reinforcing racialised hierarchies of who is likely to secure the top positions in the first place.

Conclusion

We set out to investigate the material basis of elite education in the UK by examining the commercial overseas ventures of British elite schools through the lens of racial capitalism. Writers on racial capitalism point out that capitalism and the social structures it generates are racialised; in other words, whiteness permeates these structures and capitalism itself (Melamed, 2015; Robinson, 2020; Virdee, 2019). We have argued that the case of elite British boarding schools exporting their ‘brands’ overseas is a salient example of racial capitalism in and through education. First, through these overseas branches, families in the Global South generate wealth for the elite British boarding schools, to add to their already vast sums of income and wealth. Our analysis of school accounts, and its contextualisation within the local contexts where these schools operate, show that these transactions are not benign. This is really the corner stone of racial capitalism, the accumulation of capital through the exploitation of racialised ‘others’. Second, they capitalise on their name and identity, which are steeped in whiteness and Britishness, as well as on specifically white/British/public school materialities (clock towers, quads, uniforms, school crest, portraits of Churchill), practices (‘house’ system), and cultural images (Harry Potter) that potentially reinforce colonialist legacies of what is ‘valued’ and ‘valuable’ (Gerrard et al., 2021). On the face of it, in the fine-tuned replicas they have created, and through the metaphor of the ‘family’ that they use, they are selling the identity of white Western privilege. In our interviews with staff, paternalistic and sometimes racialised justifications have surfaced that downplay and legitimate these extractive practices. Third, our data suggest that these UK schools manage the relationship in such a way that ensures their positioning and status, contributing to the idea of their overseas branches as somehow inferior. Melamed (2015) writes how capitalism works by differentiating between social groups, solidifying racial inequalities. It is clear from their positioning and status, which is layered with the implicit disavowal of Global South contexts. Under racial capitalism, it is in the interests of these elite schools (‘controllers of capital’) to maintain and strengthen hierarchies of difference. The schools maintain North and South hierarchies at the same time as generating capital from this hierarchical positioning to sustain further their dominance. We suggest that this likely reproduces rather than it disrupts racialised divisions of labour.

We have found the concept of racial capitalism useful to analyse these relationships as extractive rather than as the educational partnerships or ‘families’ that they purport to be. In times of dramatic GEI expansion and normalisation of extractive practices in and through ‘international’ education, racial capitalism helps to disrupt analyses that frame such practices in terms of supply and demand and/or focus on the supposed service such schools provide to a growing global middle class. While these schools certainly play a role in the social reproduction of (segments of) local elites, their primary purpose is to subsidise the social reproduction of British elites in the UK. In the context of British elite schools and their overseas ventures, racial capitalism also helps to bridge the gap that exists between the literature on the GEI on the one hand, and the expanding literature examining the colonial and postcolonial practices of elite schools and international schools and their co-construction of eliteness and whiteness (Angod & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2019; Ayling, 2019).

What is the broader impact of these overseas venture? In effect, the UK schools channel substantial funds from these schools in the Global South to maintain the privilege of groups in the Global North, who will never let them in. Whether the money is paid directly by families or by their multinational employers, this takes away resources that could be distributed locally (through fair taxation of multinational corporations, for example), to benefit British elites instead. Arguably, this also reflects racial labour market inequalities, and is especially striking in the case of satellite school ventures given that they are maintaining the same racial capitalist structures that maintain the status quo. In fact, by providing a new and lucrative revenue source, they will likely only strengthen connections between ‘mother’ schools and positions of power.

Our small qualitative dataset is limited in what it can tell us about the dynamics within a fast-growing segment of the international education market, and while it gives interesting insights into the experience of teaching and management staff, the voices of students and families are missing. Whilst beyond the scope of our research, it would be interesting to understand their positioning within local education markets, and which families see them as conceivable choices (and which do not). The extent to which these schools will disrupt social structures and the positional status of educational goods locally will likely differ across Global South contexts. These schools may not appeal across the social strata within Global South countries in equal measure (see Maxwell, Yemini, Koh, & Agbaria, 2019). There is unlikely to be any disavowal of educational institutions that have long been associated with ruling elites, for example, the association between elite national schools and the civil service in Korea and China. There is ample scope to explore these differences across diverse, complex Global South contexts through a more nuanced application of the racial capitalist lens.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Despite being private and receiving no direct funding from the state, they are called ‘public schools’ for historical reasons. We have capitalised the terms throughout to signal that we are not referring to state schools.

2 Bloom Holdings is a real estate development company who have partnered with elite school brands Brighton College (UK) and Dwight (USA) to open schools within the UAE (https://bloomholding.com).

3 Organisation to Decolonise the IB, https://odis.carrd.co/

4 Fryer and Fishwick (2023) have found that the sums received far exceed Harrow’s expenditure on bursaries.

5 Calculated based on school fees in international school database, https://www.international-schools-database.com/