How Nord Anglia Went From A Six-School Operation to a $14.5bn Education Leader
EQT has helped transform Nord Anglia Education from six schools to 90 using strategic acquisitions and data-driven operations to drive global growth and educational excellence.
- Private capital supported Nord Anglia transformation from a six-school operation into a $14.5bn international educational platform, operating more than 80 schools.
Like any good courtship, international schools operator Nord Anglia Education played it cool when it was first approached by Baring Private Equity Asia (now part of EQT). Back in 2008, Nord Anglia was a 35-year-old UK-listed company and had several investors knocking on its door looking to take it over.
“We were being approached by a number of different private equity firms because people could see the potential of the schools,” explains Andrew Fitzmaurice, Nord Anglia’s CEO since 2003.
The company had caught EQT’s eye because, unlike its peers, it ran the six schools in its portfolio as one platform, rather than keeping them as disparate entities.
But Nord Anglia needed serious efficiency gains to scale, not least because international education was (and still is) a hyper-fragmented market.
Eventually, Nord Anglia was wooed by EQT’s offer to take the company private for $400m, prompting the start of a nearly two-decade partnership. The investment firm quickly employed its regional expertise in Asia Pacific to help Nord Anglia acquire top international schools for its portfolio.
Today, Nord Anglia runs more than 80 schools across 34 countries, educating more than 90,000 students worldwide, and was valued at $14.5bn in March.
But this transformation didn’t happen by accident.
The private capital advantage
For Nord Anglia, private equity backing provided a rare combination: patient capital with a shared long-term vision.
“When you’re a private company, the shareholder is really deep into the understanding of what it is you’re doing,” Fitzmaurice says. “They own a significant slice of the organization’s equity and have a greater influence on your approach.”
In practice, he explains, this translates into regular weekly contact between Nord Anglia and EQT. That’s provided not only a strategic steer but also invaluable support during tough times. “With private equity, the shareholders are very much in the boat rowing along with you,” he notes.
Fitzmaurice recalls that this proved especially important during COVID-19. When schools worldwide were forced to close, EQT kept “cool heads” and provided additional capital.
“They didn’t panic,” he recalls. “It was always this thing about alignment, agreement, collaboration, not turning up as the shareholder and saying, ‘Isn’t this terrible? What are you doing about it?’”
Going for growth
The financial firepower provided by private equity backers, combined with access to veteran deal makers and advisers, has helped grow Nord Anglia’s portfolio of schools 15-fold over nearly two decades.
“Prior to us joining Nord Anglia in 2008, they’d never actually acquired a school,” said Jack Hennessy, Chairman of EQT’s Asia Cross Border strategy, which focuses on partnering with high-quality companies for which Asia is a key growth driver, and that can benefit from EQT’s expertise and resources to accelerate growth and enhance performance.
EQT’s M&A specialists have been key in identifying potential fits for Nord Anglia’s portfolio. The team focuses on top-ranked schools that annually charge an average fee of $25,000 in cities with high demand for an international school education. Nord Anglia then focuses on improving the educational quality to drive enrollment, with around 40 percent of children accepted into the world’s top 100 universities.
The company has been specific when it comes to strategic acquisitions. “We don’t want to do a turnaround,” Fitzmaurice explains. “We want to acquire successful schools, where, even before we’ve bought them, we know what the potential areas for improvement are.”
In the past few years, the company has moderated its M&A activities, preferring organic growth, its largest growth driver. “We have a very clear strategy now, which is to grow existing schools,” says Fitzmaurice.
The idea is to add capacity, either by expanding existing facilities or opening additional campuses in different parts of the city.
Source: PitchBook
Another value creation lever behind the schools’ organization’s growth has been investment in its operations. Supported by EQT, the company added data-driven analysis to its decision-making processes.
Every week, Fitzmaurice leads a comprehensive business performance review with each regional team. This discussion includes fees, enrollment forecasts, marketing metrics, expansion plans, and academic performance. Insights on everything from pupil contact time to teacher productivity are then fed to school principals.
“We’re very clear about what we’re trying to do, and that means that we can see any divergence in each area,” Fitzmaurice explains.
“Your average local school doesn’t think about what the right enterprise resource planning system is, what the right student information system is, or how to track the customer journey,” notes Alexander Hansen, a Director on EQT’s Asia Cross Border team.
Leveraging scale
As Nord Anglia grew, it could scale its learnings and resources from one Nord Anglia school to another and deploy a common curriculum where geographically possible. The organization has also built global partnerships with MIT, UNICEF, The Juilliard School and IMG Academy.
“Nord Anglia is effectively investing tens of millions of dollars a year in curriculum development, teacher training, and system development, and it’s harmonizing that across a platform of 80 plus schools,” adds Hennessy.
The ambition is to align the success of investors with those of parents and students. “Our parents should get a better education per dollar spent on tuition fees than from schools that haven’t got our benefits of scale,” Hennessy says.
This has created a virtuous cycle: attracting strong student enrolment and employee talent. Nord Anglia now has over 160,000 job applicants annually, averaging over 800 candidates per opening. The company also focuses intently on talent development so that approximately 70 percent of school principals are promoted from within.
For the founders who sell their schools to Nord Anglia, this value proposition is crucial. “They’re not trying to sell to a private equity firm. They’re trying to find someone who’s going to be a great long-term custodian of their school,” says Hennessy.
This systematic approach to scale – where every acquisition immediately benefits from shared resources – is what separates Nord from competitors who simply “buy schools and keep them independent,” Hennessy adds.
Today, only 5 to 6 percent of the premium international education market is currently consolidated, with most schools still individually operated. That means Nord’s transformation from six schools to around 90 institutions is potentially just the beginning.
“We are unlikely to ever run out of opportunities,” said Hennessy.
ThinQ is the must-bookmark publication for the thinking investor.
