UK Private schools becoming like big MNCs, good or bad?

[schoolSearch2]

In this last year, I have heard multiple mergers and acquisitions in the private school sector and the talk of opening campuses abroad as well.

Sevenoaks+Solefield, a few in Scotland, Alleyn's and I think pretty much every school that has a brand/reputation yo leverage, has a campus abroad now and in some cases, in multiple countries.

What's your view,
Do you think it dilutes the USP of a specific school?
My interest is in the academically rigorous ones.

I do not think Eton College has done this yet? The most well known one. I bet loads of international education groups are desperate to get their hand on the Eton brand. They do not need to sell out, because they have over 500 million endowment and can just invest it instead.

The rest of them do not have this financial cushion and have to mitigate political risk. Current flavour of Labour dislikes private schools and so they are presumably just mitigating that risk.
Schools buying preps is to safeguard future pupils and save those preps from going bankrupt and presumably they only do a deal if they get the real estate, so if the plan does not work out, they can sell it and not bank a loss.

Whether UK private schools will lose their prestige? I doubt it. Labour has just turned the top one into Rolexes. Only accessible to the super rich so probably even more in demand with the international rich than ever.

My concern is not so much diluting the brand as how much of the SLT’s time and energy is going to be taken up by the new “branches”. I can see many a Head choosing a recce trip to Dubai or Singapore over a meeting about staffing or with demanding parents.

I’m sure the many branches model can work well for some schools but I’m happy our school is still owned within a charitable structure and only manages our own school. It just means decisions are all taken with our school and dc in mind not for the good of a wider structure.

They are franchises rather than extensions. They will have their own identity and reputation soon enough. The main school will profit from them using their name but would, I imagine, distance themselves quickly if it threatened their reputation. I suspect they will have middle of the road teachers going there for the tax breaks and in the hope they will one day get to work at the main school.

The bigger issue is all the indies in the UK being bought up by big education trusts like Dukes, Inspired Education etc. They close down the ones that don't turn a big enough profit for their shareholders, with little to no notice, and turn the remaining into homogenous clones. To be fair Dukes seems to doing a decent job of being upfront about their plans and making improvements. Inspired is another story.