Exploring the ‘White men’ dominance of senior leaders in premium international schools

ABSTRACT

By 2022 there were over 13,000 private schools worldwide classified as delivering a non-national curriculum in English outside an English-speaking nation. Reports on the diversity of senior leaders of the “premium traditional international school” has always revealed a Western men bias although little has been reported about race. We report on the body of “premium non-traditional international schools”, those belonging to a branded, corporate, profit-driven grouping where we hypothesised that a greater diversity might exist with regard to sex and race. Our survey of the websites of 247 schools belonging to 10 major groupings reveals, from photographic evidence, that 88% of senior leaders are White, and 64% are White men. This finding is very similar to a recent report into diversity among the premium traditional sector. We explore this situation and offer for discussion two sets of possible reasons. An unwritten truth pertains that the recruitment of senior leaders is biased towards White men, whilst at another level the uncertainty, risks, and commercialisation of the field might be more attractive to White men. Both lead to a situation that is rarely questioned or discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• International schools
• leadership
• race
• gender

Introduction

Our paper is concerned with a fast-growing arena of private schools that teach a non-local curriculum in English outside an English-speaking nation. From a steady base of about 1,000 schools until the 1990s (Hayden and Thompson 1995), the number of K-12 English-medium “international schools” had hit 6,000 in January 2012. According to the data mined by ISC Research, a steady continuous growth rate of two per day since 2012 saw the 11,000-mark hit in 2019 (Speck 2019), then 12,000 by early 2020 (Stacey 2020), and almost 13,000 by mid-2022 (Packer 2022). Continuous growth is expected until at least 2030 (Gaskell 2016). By 2019, China had the most schools, and the United Arab Emirates (Dubai in particular) had the most students. The number of educators serving the field grew from 90,000 in year 2000 to 548,000 in 2021 (Worth 2021).

The body of “international schools” in recent decades has not only grown but has become quite complex and splintered. It was asserted that 10% of the total body might be deemed as expensive, high-quality, accredited “premium international schools”, and this minor sub-arena forms the basis for our study. Totally about 1,300 in 2023, the majority are likely of the non-profit driven, accredited “Type A traditional” schools (Hayden and Thompson 2013), largely serving the globally mobile business/diplomatic community and epitomised by the 1924-established International Schools in Geneva, and Yokohama. Another much smaller traditional type is deemed to be “Type B ideological” schools, epitomised in practice by the United World College movement.

Despite the widespread growth, the leadership of premium traditional-type international schools, although accepted to be sensitive and complex with a very high rate of turnover (Benson 2011), stands largely ignored and under-investigated. Benson (2011, 23) had argued “there is a paucity of literature about issues related to chief administrators in the context of the international school” whilst others have noted the “paucity of published empirical research” about leadership (Lee, Hallinger, and Walker 2012, 289). More recent comment has said that “research literature on leadership in international schools is thin on the ground” (Lee and Walker 2018, 465).

This lack of real knowledge is compounded by a research field as wide as the planet itself, leaving enormous space for interpretation and anecdote to subsume actual truth and influence important operational and even strategic decisions in the field. This kind of epistemology is rooted in what Bourdieu (1977) termed as the field mechanism “Doxa”. In brief explanation, this builds on the Durkheimian older thinking of a sociology of religion to more modern sociology of culture which effectively does the same job. The term doxa ‘… refers to the misrecognition of forms of social arbitrariness which creates the unformulated, non-discursive, yet internalized and practical recognition of that same social arbitrariness. That is to say that doxa is a phenomenon in human interactions and is reproduced in social institutions and structures, much in the way people may simply believe that women do not lift heavy boxes and men do not cry at work. (It sounds normal, but on reflection, appears inaccurate). Bourdieu himself termed this “… a set of fundamental beliefs which does not even need to be asserted in the form of an explicit, self-conscious dogma” (Bourdieu 1977, 16). International schools operate in a distended, inconsistently regulated field and in understanding the people who lead them, and how they understand their world is central to the scope of our paper.

Much focus has been on the changing nature of the students and parents, with comment being made about a new “class” being involved perhaps akin to a “Global Middle Class” (Beech et al. 2021). Indeed, that concept has also been applied to the teachers (Tarc, Tarc, and Wu 2019). However, the profile of the senior leaders has been neglected by research inquiry. It has recently been claimed that “very little has been written about how international school leaders are prepared for their roles”, and “Little is known about how people become senior leaders in international schools” (Gibson and Bailey 2021, 1007). We might assume that the relatively high turnover is one reason why so little literature has addressed the character and nature of senior leaders, making direct contact and longitudinal studies difficult. Another plausible reason might be that much data is held and owned by private commercial agencies such as ISC Research and leading recruitment agencies such as Search Associates, and our study will attempt to address this by using photographic and biographical data obtainable in the public domain on school websites, as recently also done by Gibson and Bailey (2023).

Studies on the people who make up this demographic are indeed rare yet points to a bias towards hiring native-English-speaking Anglo-American White men. Referring to prejudice in recruitment among the premium traditional body of international schools, Canterford (2003, 48) had argued that there is “anecdotal evidence that this form of discrimination does exist”. It is argued (Slough-Kuss 2014, 220) that “there is much to question in the status quo concerning the candidates for international school leadership”. Yet, surprisingly little research has been undertaken into the nature, extent, and mechanism of this “status quo”. Our paper delves into this controversial topic through the lens of the diversity in international schools in terms of the biological sex of leaders, which has had some attention, and for seemingly the first-time, race. We know that diversity matters for these schools; for example, the International School of Geneva has a values statement that says it aims to “provide a high quality inclusive international education based on the principles of equality and solidarity among all peoples and the equal value of all human beings”. In this regard, we see the seemingly inherent and structural bias towards hiring Western White men as contradictory and paradoxical, and worthy of critical scrutiny.

Moreover, this time we focus attention on the over-looked and fast-growing premium non-traditional body of “Type C” international schools (Hayden and Thompson 2013), catering largely for local parents within a branded, corporate, and profit-driven paradigm of activity. Centred on Asia and the Middle East, with some growing activity in North and South America, at the centre of this activity is the Dubai-based GEMS Education, and London-based Nord Anglia, and the smaller groupings of quasi-replicated British private schools overseas pioneered in the 1990s in Thailand by Dulwich College, and Harrow. This approach builds on the previous work above and provides more nuanced understanding of power relations in the broader body of 1,300 “premium international schools” and shifts attention beyond the traditional types that have dominated previous discussion.

Diversity in international schools

Previous studies

There have been surprisingly few studies into the sex breakdown of senior leaders in international schools, and some are now quite dated (e.g. Benson 2011; Hawley 1994; Rees 1992; Thearle 1999). All had examined diversity in the “traditional” arena, which was the dominant scene until the 1990s. Rees had looked at 61 schools, Benson’s study involved a mere 83 schools, whilst Hawley looked at 336 schools, and Thearle’s study was a survey from a database of 1,242 schools. All those studies found that the proportion of women senior leaders was less than one-quarter (in fact, a mere 12% according to Hawley’s study). Thearle (2000, 112) had painted a damning picture when concluding that “women are under-represented in senior management positions in international schools”, and that they “offer stereotypical role models to students”. Later comment about senior leadership in international schools argued that “the field continues to be fertile with young men” (Duevel, Nashman-Smith, and Stern 2015, 34).

Beyond the dominance of men, we know very little if anything at all about the race of the senior leaders (and even less about sexual orientation or ethnicity/religion), aside from a few Doctoral studies. One study (Phan 2019, 107) had concluded that there is a lack of diversity in leadership roles; it was said that there is a need “to transform the current landscape of inequality in gender in the head of school position and add more ethnic diversity to leadership positions in international schools”. That study (Phan 2019) had shown that of 190 senior leader respondents, 82% are White. An earlier study (Keung and Rockinson-Szapkiw 2013) among 193 schools had revealed a 93.3% White proportion of respondents, whilst 77.7% were men.

Reports on leadership in traditional international schools continue to rarely disclose sex or race thus it is difficult to say if the situation is improving, or not. For example, a recent report about the training needs of 17 leaders in Kuwait (Ellen Kelly 2022) showed the nationality of participants (hence alluding to ethnicity) but not sex or race. At the same time, Fisher’s (2021, 136) study of eight leaders had not noted the race but showed that four are women and had concluded that “the variety of gender and experience levels contributed to the richness of the leaders” characteristics’.

The wider body of literature about teachers in international schools has tended to focus on ethnicity rather than sex or race. It is very common to see references to a scene dominated by “Anglo-Western teachers” (Tarc, Tarc, and Wu 2019), “Western expatriate teachers” (Burke 2017), and “Anglophone educators” (Savva 2017), reinforcing Canterford’s (2003) notion that a bias exists towards recruiting teachers from a few Western nations, mainly in North America or from Britain.

A recent study

However, a 2021 study uncovered the race of senior leaders, revealing a dominance of White men. The survey Determining the Diversity Baseline in International Schools by the Council of International Schools, International Schools Services, and George Mason University was released in August 2021. It reported on 175 senior leaders, 58% of which are based in a school in Asia and 12% in Africa and showed that 84% are White whilst 6% are Asian and 2% are Black. In other words, the senior leader is 5.3 times more likely to be White than any other race. Further, 75% are men, halfway between Benson’s figure of 70% and Thearle’s finding of 80%. In terms of nationality/ethnicity, 89% emanated from a Western nation (51% are American, and 17% are British). These findings strongly support the comment made by Slough-Kuss (2014, 227) that “the profile is somewhat male and Western”. Sough-Kuss builds upon the finding by Canterford (2003, 52) that British and American teachers made up 52% of the average faculty in premium traditional international schools, rising to 57% in those in Asia. Although Canterford (2003, 63) had not analysed the nationality or origins of senior leaders he had concluded that “it is clear that international schools are operating various levels of discrimination and are thus working in segmented labour markets”. The use of the word “discrimination” implies that a structural bias exists that might pertain to senior leaders as well.

A significant finding of the report is that the “84% White” figure at senior leadership level was higher than the 74% found within the wider “leadership team”. At the same time, the sex split within the leadership team was almost equal, with 52% men and 48% women. In other words, the White men dominance appears to exist more at the senior leadership level (e.g. the Director/Principal). These findings confirm research on the increased pressures and biases faced by women more generally in educational leadership. Moving on to the faculty in general, the report found that 61% are women, and about half (49%) are White. Therefore, we can identify a distinct White men bias at the senior leadership level which does not reflect the wider teaching or leadership body.

That 2021 report had also looked at the diversity of Board members, revealing the fact that this body of institutions are of the “traditional” (Hayden and Thompson 2013) variety. This type is autonomous, controlled by a Board of Trustees (elected by parents, who in turn appoint the senior leader). Numbering about 600, this type of well-established schools is often termed by players in the field as “Tier-1 schools” implying a degree of quality-assurance and high standards of ethical behaviour. To repeat an important point, this is the arena studied by the previous reports mentioned above (Thearle 1999 etc.).

The field of study

Our study will take the issue of diversity and bias into the much larger “non-traditional” setting, where a large and growing array of schools is profit-driven and often operating within a branded group delivering an educational service to the local (host-nation) population. This is an increasingly complex landscape. Building upon Hayden and Thompson (2013) analogy of the “non-traditional” type being “Type C”, Poole (2023) refers to the “non-traditional premium” body as “Type C1” (whilst a large body of non-accredited, lower-quality C2 type also exist). Many of these “Type C1” schools are in Asia and the Middle East where they have emerged largely by stealth (Kim and Mobrand 2019) and they often belong to a grouping owned by a private equity company or a sovereign wealth fund. This will allow us to garner a much clearer picture about the emergent diversity of senior leaders, across a much broader range of international schools and within a greater geographical spread.

It is noted by Gibson and Bailey (2021, 2) that beside the major demographic shifts, towards educating the children of local parents, a major under-reported growth issue has emerged, where “New actors, such as global chains of international schools, have also entered the arena”. ISC Research in 2022 was reporting that over one-third (38%) belong to a branded network grouping (Packer 2022). This is the essence of the premium non-traditional type (i.e. “Type C1”), with an ownership and governance model that is more commercial and corporate (Waterson 2016) but within the profit-driven private equity paradigm it remains largely non-transparent to both outsiders and insiders. One study into senior leadership in such schools (James and Sheppard 2014, 2) had concluded that senior leaders “viewed the governing arrangements positively, perhaps because they often had considerable autonomy over educational matters even though they may be excluded from the governing of financial/resource matters”. Of the 616 different groups, serving 2.12 million children, the biggest in terms of serving children is GEMS Education with 43 schools educating 124,000 children. The biggest in terms of schools is the China-centred Maple Bear Global Schools grouping involves 360 schools. This sub-arena has seen enormous growth in recent years and has enjoyed a 70% increase in student numbers since 2017 (when there were 333 groups), whilst generating annually USD 22.3 billion in fee income alone (Packer 2022).

Methodology

Gibson and Bailey (2021, 3) make special reference to “the big international corporate players of Nord Anglia, Cognita and GEMS who manage schools in a range of countries, and the satellite campuses of prestigious private schools from the UK and US such as Harrow and Dulwich”. Building upon this, our paper examines the gender and race of senior leaders in the five “players” mentioned above, alongside a further five major branded, commercial groupings. This makes a total of eight (Aldar Academies, GEMS Education, Cognita, Nord Anglia Education, International Schools Partnership, Inspired Education Group, Orbital Education, XCL Education, Harrow International, and Dulwich International).

In total, 247 schools are examined. The websites were all visited in September 2022. The process of viewing the photos (and often, short biographies) of the senior leader is relatively straightforward, and quick. First, the official corporate website is found (e.g. nordangliaeducation.com). Next, the “Our Schools” page is accessed. A list of all schools will appear, and each school website can be viewed in turn. The opening page will give a “Welcome” address by the senior leader of each school. An exception is GEMS Education where the official website (gemseducation.com) leads to a page titled “We are GEMS” where the “Our Leadership” page is showing the photos of all the current senior leaders without visiting the individual schools. This approach was ratified by a recent study (Gibson and Bailey 2023, 412) into race among senior leaders of international schools in Malaysia, which found that: “Frequently web pages opened with greeting from the Principal, almost invariably White, along with the photographs and often personal biographies that emphasised their Western background”.

As all the schools belong to branded, corporate, commercially driven organisations we might assume that the detail about the senior leader is regularly updated by the relevant marketing teams. We noticed that the term “Principal” was used by 210 of the schools, whereas “Director” seems to be a more common term in the traditional international schools. This use of different terminology to describe the senior leader is confusing but the dominance of the term “Principal” might be more appropriate in the case of commercial networks that are led by an appointed Board of Directors rather than an elected parental Board of Trustees.

Much care has been taken with the terminology of the study. The seventh (2020) edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (“APA 7”) states that “race” refers to physical appearance, whilst the more complex and subjective term “ethnicity” refers to shared cultural practices, beliefs, and religious background. As this study involves the measurement of a person’s colour by physical appearance, the term “race” is used rather than “ethnicity”. Further, “APA 7” states that the terms “White” and “Black”, as proper nouns, should be capitalised. The term “Asian” should be used for persons originating from the Asian geographical region. “APA 7” suggest that the nouns “male” and “female” should be avoided and replaced with specific nouns of people of different ages, such as “men” and “women”. Last, ‘APA 7’suggest that “sex” be used when talking about a person’s biological appearance, rather than “gender” which refers to a complicated set of fluid social groupings.

Exploring the field

The fifth largest grouping worldwide (Packer 2022) is the London-based Nord Anglia Education, founded in 1972, and having 77 schools in 31 nations educating 68,000 children. Once listed on the New York Stock Exchange, the company has been a private equity company since 2017. Overall, 50 (64%) of the 77 senior leaders are White men.

However, there are major regional discrepancies, and anomalies, and it worth going into more detail. Of the 21 schools in China, 13 senior leaders are White men. Of the eight women, five are Asian. In other words, 62% are male and 75% are White. In the five schools in India, all senior leaders are women and all five are Asian. Of the 12 schools based in the ASEAN region (Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam), five senior leaders are women, but all are White. Across Latin America, the eight schools have six White men, and the two women are Asian. In the United States, all 10 senior leaders are White men. In the 16 schools in Europe, there are 10 men, and 15 senior leaders are White. Of the six schools in the Middle East, four are men and all six are White.

GEMS Education is the largest provider of private schooling in the world. GEMS have 43 schools in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, plus four in Egypt. Overall, there is evidence of much balance in terms of sex and racial diversity. In total, 24 senior leaders are women, of which 10 are White. Of the other 23 senior leaders, 15 are White men. Overall, of the 47 schools, 48% of senior leaders are White men.

Dulwich College International has six international schools, of which four are in China, plus two international high schools, both in China. Of the eight branches, six have senior leaders who are men and all eight are White. Harrow International have four schools in China alongside one each in Hong Kong, Japan, and Thailand. Of the seven branches, four of the senior leaders are men and all seven are White.

London-based International Schools Partnership (ISP), a private equity company partly owned by an Ontario pension fund, have 46 schools in 15 nations. The senior leaders in 22 schools are women (24 are men). In total, 42 of the 46 senior leaders are White, and 52% are White men.

London-based Cognita is owned by a Swiss private equity company, Jacobs Holdings. It has a diverse range of 90 schools. However, the schools in Brazil, Chile, and the UK are all private schools offering the local curriculum (and not in English) and are not therefore excluded from this study as they might be better deemed to be “private national schools”. The 30 English-speaking international schools are in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, and include well-established schools such as Southbank International School, in London. Of the 30 senior leaders, all are White and nine are women (33%). In other words, Cognita’s body of senior leaders in international schools are 66% White men.

London-based Inspired Education Group was established by a Lebanese businessman in 2013. It has 14 international schools across Europe including well-established ones such the International School of Milan, and St. John’s International School in Belgium. Of the 14, all are White, and nine are White men. Cheshire-based Orbital Education own nine international schools in seven countries including China and Russia. Of the nine senior leaders, we find that five are White men and four are White female.

Aldar Academies, part of the Alder Education Group, operate seven schools in Abu Dhabi. All seven senior leaders are White, and four are men. Last, Singapore-based XCL Education has eight schools across Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam, including the 1,600-student XCL World Academy in Singapore, and is financially backed by the Singapore state holding company Temasek. The XCL group has a large degree of diversity, since four of the eight senior leaders are White men, with one White woman, one Asian man, and two Asian women.

In total, the 247 non-traditional international schools belonging to a corporate grouping in our study contained 158 men (64%), whilst 218 of all the 247 senior leaders are White (88%). Almost all men are White (99.2%), meaning that almost two-thirds (64%) of senior leaders overall are White men.

We found a range of figures. The highest proportion of White men can be seen in the relatively small grouping of Dulwich International (75%), followed by the bigger bloc of Cognita schools (66%). Next comes Inspired (64%) and the large body of Nord Anglia schools (63%). A further four groupings had a majority of senior leaders who are White men. Only GEMS Education, where all the schools are in Arab nations, had a figure below 50%, with 48% of senior leaders being White men. Incidentally, there is not a single Black senior leader.

Discussion

The results of our study are surprising, even paradoxical, given the nature and operations of the field – internationalism based on the belief in diversity, equity, respect, and inclusion. However, we are focusing our study on the corporate profit-driven arena where market forces are strongest. This does not necessarily equate to a bias towards White men. At the outset of this endeavour, it was felt that the corporate networks and groupings, some of which have previously been listed on stock-markets, might be generally more diverse in terms of sex and race, mainly because of the perceived concern they might have over their image and reputation. In fact, the 88% White leader figure in our study of 247 non-traditional schools was remarkably close to the 2021 study of 175 of the traditional type, which had a 84% White figure, showing that the dominance of White leaders cuts across the premium international school sector, involving both the well-established, autonomous, non-profit traditional and the branded commercially driven non-traditional settings.

We cannot merely “blame” the governance model of the traditional type, arguing that the Board of Trustees are deliberately (re)selecting White men. As noted by Slough-Kuss (2012, 221), in the traditional setting “Those who have responsibility at this level are the school boards who appoint heads”. Conversely, we cannot solely blame the market-driven conditions of the commercial groupings, whereby parental pressure (Canterford 2003, 55, had termed this “customer discrimination”) enacts a bias towards White men. At the same time, the 88% White figure sits well with public schools in England, where 96% of all senior leaders are White (Webber 2022).

The 36% figure for women leaders in our study was quite a bit higher than the 25% figure for the 2021 study. To put this into perspective, consider that 64% of all public secondary school senior leaders in England are men (O’Conor 2015). Therefore, at first glance the 64% figure seems quite “normal”. However, as premium international schools tend to be K-12 through-schools it makes sense to look at the broader picture, where only 35% of school senior leaders in all primary and all secondary schools in England are men. In this context, we might argue that there are twice as many senior leaders in international schools who are men than there are found in schools generally in England. To take an international perspective, consider that across all the OECD nations, 55% of senior leaders are men thus we can see that the 63–75% figures for premium international schools is relatively high compared to international benchmarks.

How can we begin to make sense of that? We might begin to apply Bourdieu’s (1977) arguably under-used concept of doxa; this says that it seems like something else is happening, which masks the discrimination and leads to it being misrecognised and subsequently under-discussed (Friedland 2009). The field mechanisms of capital is helpful here, as it works in tandem with doxa. For example, cultural capital is influenced by people’s perceptions of social reality (not always by the facts), as is symbolic, economic and social capital. The “other thing” that might be happening is that the doxa surrounding the field of international schools is found in Bourdieu’s own analysis of society which aligns well with Marx’s concept of false consciousness. Both thinkers find a societal dis-connection between objective reality and subjective perception/understanding. In Bourdieu’s (1977) modern take on this he finds that the perception of capital in its various forms depends to a large extent on how advantage is not only perceived, but also how it is presented. This involves the process that Bourdieu calls “misrecognition”. This leads to wide ranging acceptance that some children are better than others, that some families have more right to education than others. This process of misrecognition is, in turn, a type of “symbolic violence”, and so we can assume there is a form of discrimination being enacted towards the non-dominant demographic, that it is based upon misrecognition of capitals, replicated and enforced in doxa, and delivering symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1977).

So, it is with the societies within which we operate, we ignore “that which goes without saying because it comes without saying” (Doxa) (Bourdieu 1977, 167). The schools in our study are competing in a growing commercialised market. One key factor influencing this type of international school is marketisation. In order to maintain operations in the school, it must appeal to customer demands which directly affect its Unique Selling Point, or distinction (Bourdieu 1984). It goes without saying that the school is likely to strategise its recruitment policy to satisfy customer demand and not merely based upon the moral positioning of equity, diversity and inclusion.

However, there is another way of approaching this topic. Leadership of international schools involves a number of unwritten truths and many are based upon the reality of every-day operations. Blandford and Shaw (2001, 28) see the senior leader in the traditional international school as being in a more precarious position than in most national schools and that “being fired is a frequent occurrence”. Blandford and Shaw consider this situation as a “disease” and diagnose that “… the school is now in a self-perpetuating cycle of short-termism, lurching from one crisis to the next” (35). One seminal study (Hawley 1994) revealed an average longevity of leaders as being just 2.8 years, whilst Littleford (1999, 23) had argued that that: “Almost eighty percent of all heads of school are fired. They do not leave of their own volition”. It seems almost normal, even a law, that the senior leader of a traditional international school has a short, abrupt tenure. Caffyn (2010, 50) identified “issues of identity, fear and vulnerability”. Within this harsh setting, we might perhaps expect the leadership of an international school to both attract and be attractive to a certain type of leader i.e. the bias is towards the attraction as much as the recruitment. Put another way, it is probably unattractive to many.

It is significant that our study was amongst the leading set of commercial groupings. Machin (2014) noted how the role of the senior leader in profit-driven non-traditional international schools is changing, and they are expected to be at ease with the discourse of business and profit. He argues that “(for-profit) international school leaders are increasingly required to be personally, philosophically and ontologically at ease with simultaneous educational – commercial discourses, as well versed in the patois of commerce as they are those of education” (Machin 2014, 19). Keller (2015, 990) noted how “The leadership context for international schools is often filled with ambiguity and complex tensions between opposing forces”, and this tension is even more pronounced in the profit-driven environment where aggressive market forces are mixed with the inherent values of internationalism and cosmopolitanism. We speculate that this issue leads to men being preferred, acting as a form of hidden sexism. At the same time, Western-born and trained men are arguably likely to be even more at ease with this position as a leader, and likely to be more assertive and risk-taking. Many (non-Western) women leaders might feel uncomfortable with the business/profit discourse. This all seems so obvious it is probably never openly discussed, acting as a definite form of doxa.

Conclusions

Adding our study of 247 non-traditional schools belonging to a commercial grouping to the CIS (2021) one involving 175 non-profit-driven traditional international schools, we now have evidence from 422 well-established and well-regarded premium international schools regarding the diversity of senior leader in terms of sex and race. This represents approximately one-third of all 1,300 schools that arguably exist in the arena of premium international schools. Together, the combined total of 285 senior leaders who are men equates to 68.5%, whilst the White proportion is 83%.

One limitation of our study worth mentioning for peer researchers is that we found identifying the “international school” body of some groupings difficult. For example, the Cognita body of schools is especially complex, made up of 90 schools in 14 nation-states delivering 12 different curricula in many different languages. We focused our study on the Cognita schools delivering a curriculum in English or having the moniker “International” in the title, which is a crude identifier.

The figure of 68.5% men as senior leader in our study is very close to that found by previous studies (albeit involving only the traditional arena) e.g. Thearle’s (1999) study found 66% of senior leaders are men, and Benson’s (2011) study said it was 70%. In other words, the sex disparity seems deeply structural, and fairly consistent over time, although the figure is far below Hawley’s (1994) finding of 88%. The race issue, with 83% of senior leaders being White is a new finding, ignored or bypassed by all previous studies, although it does support the hunch by Slough-Kuss (2014, 223) that research into the topic would make explicit “the emphasis of Western domination”. Indeed, a small-scale study of school websites in Malaysia (Gibson and Bailey 2023, 413) has revealed that: “the senior management teams were also often shown, either in group pictures or individually; their Western Whiteness being clear”.

Slough-Kuss (2014, 223) had optimistically claimed that the “status quo” might be broken and sometime in the future “new heads who are culturally diverse – perhaps non-Western, perhaps non-native English speaking, perhaps female, perhaps younger – may open up a new era of international education”. Unfortunately, this new era still seems a long way off. We speculate that premium international schools in general seem to operationalise a structural form of distinction based upon a powerful form of doxa which privileges White men as senior leaders. At the same time, we might speculate that leadership of an international school is more attractive to (Western) men than women. We know that longevity is short, often less than three years, and such transience and instability/unpredictability might perhaps be more attractive to men, who are generally regarded as being more risk averse (Baker and Maner 2008).

Hence, our paper presents for further exploration and discussion two possible sets of unwritten rules at play. On the one hand, the elite, expensive premium international school has a tendency to recruit White men as senior leader. This might be due to perceived parental preference or the notion that the role is best suited to that type of person, and this issue clearly warrant further study. We know that an emerging “global middle class” (GMC) in areas such as Asia and the Middle East is buying into the non-traditional arena in particular yet we still know very little about their motives, expectations, or preferences. One discussion (Maxwell et al. 2019) has identified an “important class-making process where the GMC mindfully consider what school their children should ideally attend, and what broader educational practices should be engaged with”. Making direct reference to international schools, Ball and Nikita (2014, 91) ask “whether the children of the GMC are acquiring a new kind of post-national class identity, and cosmopolitan sensibilities, through their education, and whether, together identity and sensibility are fostering a new kind of international surety and entitlement”. On the other hand, the growing commercialisation of the field coupled with the inherent unstable nature of leadership of the premium international school is perhaps less attractive to (non-Western) women. This hypothesis, that the bias is not a deliberate act of marketisation but is a natural by-product of the nature of leadership in premium international schools also warrants further study, perhaps by analysing the application data for senior leader positions.

Our study has not delved into gender, ethnicity/religion, or sexual orientation and these important dimensions of diversity remain largely untouched by research. Anecdotally, we estimate from reading the short biographies of many senior leaders on the websites, that about 50% are British and the rest are largely from Anglo-Western nations such as Canada or Australia (which fits with studies into teachers, such as that done by Canterford in Canterford 2003). However, this area of inquiry clearly requires a survey or interviews since gender, ethnicity/religion, and sexual orientation cannot be estimated from visual appearance and require the personal view of the individual. Further, given that a large proportion of leaders appear to be British, the dimension of schooling/university (and “socio-economic class”) background might be an important one for further research activity.

Significantly, our study has advanced our understanding of the situation regarding the premium international schools. The vast majority of private English-speaking international schools (90%) are of the largely under-researched “non-traditional non-premium” type (Poole’s “Type C2”). This landscape, growing fast in Asia, India, and the Middle East, remains largely untouched by research into sex and race. At the same time, there is the growing body of premium international schools termed “Chinese Internationalised Schools” (Poole 2020). Many of these schools cater for a local clientele and are staffed in the main by Chinese nationals. How many of those schools have White men as the senior leader?

Last, we note again the complete absence in our study of Black senior leaders. That points to a definite further area of research into racial discrimination in premium international schools, pointing to a form of doxa that needs explaining. There is also a need to move the discussion about the dominance of White men into discussions about teachers in international schools, which has tended to focus on ethnicity and the dominance of Western-trained teachers but rarely addresses race. Many international schools provide photographic evidence of their overall Faculty, hence a broader study into sexual and racial diversity is feasible.

It follows then, that a critical examination of premium international schools must ask the difficult question of “How did we get here?” How did the senior leadership of premium international schools come to be a generally “White men” staffing phenomenon – and why is this seemingly so acceptable to educators and seemingly attractive to parents? We note as a final point that this situation does seem to be attracting attention as a recruitment level thus it may not inevitably be a permanent feature of reality. One can see that Search Associates have a website tagline of “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” which implies that the sex and race disparities we have studied here are being taken seriously. Further and continuous research into this topic will help hold such agencies to account.

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tristan Bunnell

Tristan Bunnell is a Senior Lecturer in International Education at University of Bath.

Alexander Gardner-McTaggart

Alexander Gardner-McTaggart is a Senior Lecturer in Educational Leadership at University of Manchester.