Daybreak - When private equity acquires schools, the price may be quality education

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

Private equity is reshaping India’s schools. A relaxed New Education Policy and rising demand for international curricula have opened the doors for global operators to buy up chains across the country.The promise is scale, better infrastructure, and tighter governance. But the reality looks a little different—lean budgets, shrinking salary hikes, and a growing focus on cost-cutting. And the fallout? Increasing staff attrition, decreasing academic quality, and schools trading their founder-led ethos for a standardised model.Tune in.*Disclosure: The writer comes from a family that previously owned a school acquired partially by International Schools Partnership (ISP)**This episode was originally published on September 16th 2025Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too? It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the same. secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they managed to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into.

to the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production. Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording. Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get an alert, as soon as we release our first episode, please follow Intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcast. or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode.

For most of 2025, an 11th grade student at Glendale Academy, Hyderabad, has been teaching herself economics through YouTube. She told the Ken that her teacher had barely explained anything. The students would actually be sitting through classes and copying points from the textbook. Four years ago at Glendale, of an experience would have been unthinkable. Under its founding leadership, the international school was regarded as one of the best in South India. But that reputation is now eroding.

Things started going south after it was acquired by Singapore-based non-profit Global Schools Foundation, or GSF, which is backed by Global Alternative Investment Manager, a polo global management. A former executive at the school told us, however since the acquisition, the school's teaching and support staff has been slashed by 20%. The school's annual budgets have been trimmed and long-held traditions like the founder's memorial football and volleyball tournament have been quietly dropped. Why? Well, it was all thanks to the scalar pressures that came from Apollo Global's proposed take sale. And no thanks to this, the overall student's strength has also dropped by 20% over the past two years. Other schools,

like Hyderabad, Santa Maria and Oak Ridge have grappled with a similar churn post-acquisition by international school operators. And of course, this isn't a coincidence. You see, private equity firms have been betting big on Indian education. And here's where things get interesting. Their playbook so far has mirrored a Western model. Things like optimizing for cost control, standardizing for scale-up and centralizing for effective management.

But this doesn't quite work with India's education market, which is far more volatile and rapidly changing. Ever since the new education policy or NEP relaxed rules on foreign investment, including those on full ownership in universities, the influx of capital has been quick. GSF, for instance, has acquired over five school chains in India since 2021 and plans to deploy $550 million in the country by 2006. Another global company, the International Schools Partnership, or ISP, entered India in 2021 and now owns four school chains here.

Now, ISP is backed by investment firm Partners Group that has $174 billion in assets under management. Over the past month, my colleague the Ken reporter Wally Vikram, visited two schools and spoke with multiple founders, senior executives, teachers and students across campuses. They all pointed to one dire trend in Indian schooling, and that is the rising tide of investor-backed global school chains acquiring schools in India and bringing about a slow erosion of. of what once made these schools exceptional. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Rachel Virgis, and every day of the week, my co-host, Snickta Sharma and I, will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time.

A former executive at Glendale Academy said something that is at the core of the story. They said, you need to run a school with a heart, not a pocket. Since 2021, two international operators, GSF and ISP, have driven the bulk of India's international school acquisitions. While GSF runs 70 campuses across 12 countries, ISP operates a network of 100 schools in over 25 countries, and this focus of theirs on international schools is deliberate. Both CBCC and state board campuses face tighter fee caps

and several state-level approvals. International boards like International Baccalaureate or IB and Cambridge have a wider fee latitude and can levy development charges which create its room for upgrades and margins. Basically, this model manages to make money even within India's non-profit rule book. What that means is that all private schools in India, whether domestic or foreign-backed, must be established as not-for-profit entities, such as trust, societies or Section 8 companies.

The school usually sits in a Section 8 entity to satisfy kindergarten to grade-dwell regulations, and a for-profit services arm, which typically charges 10 to 15% of school revenue, through the likes of management fees, royalties and infrastructure leases operates on the side. The thing is, at the heart of this trend is demand. More Indian families across Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities are seeking IB and Cambridge curricula, not just for prestige, but to offer their children a global education without having to send them abroad. But while global education groups have acquired more than a dozen Indian school chains due to

this boom in demand, it's not like everything is a lot. going hunky-dory for them. More on this in the next segment. Even if investors loved what they saw, which is this demand for global schools, they forgot to focus on what the school's USP was to begin with. Instead, the likes of GSF fall back on the same approach for every school, centralized leadership, trim excess, introduce standardized systems,

and make visible infrastructure upgrades. But beneath the surface, the effects of this strategy vary sharply. At premium schools like Sancta Marlene, where annual fees are already in the 7 to 8-lac-rupes range, hikes have stayed within the usual 5 to 10%. But at lower fee campuses, the increases can be sharper. For example, at Glendale Academy, tuition jumped by 25% after its acquisition. Sources close to the International School, Manthan, in Hyderabad, told us that it saw a nearly 70% staff attrition after the 100% ISP acquisition.

A senior executive from Santa Maria, where the founder still retains a stake, said that attrition has been lower but still significant. At the Indian Public School in Coimbutur, acquired by Globe Educate, 20% of the staff left after the founder exited. Senior executives also brought up student numbers. The numbers fell by nearly a fifth at Glendale and Oak Ridge in the years after their acquisition. Of course, new salary structure could be stirring up this exodus as well. Pre-acquisition pay rises of 8 to 15% have been slashed to 2 to 7% under new management.

This may be a standard practice in the West, but it's a sharp adjustment for Indian schools. Individually, these post-acquisition changes might seem like growing pains. But taken together, they reveal a deeper problem. The same Western school playbook that made these operators successful abroad doesn't map cleanly onto India's hyper-competitive founder-led education landscape. Stay tuned. India's volatile teacher market is nowhere close to the steady status quo of the West. For example, in the UK, consistent systems mean even a small salary bump makes a huge difference.

But that's not the case in India. Here, teacher salaries are lower because they account for purchasing power parity, while the number of schools and demand for teachers are both surging. The market is anything but stable. In cities like Coimbatur where at least 10 new Cambridge schools have opened, in 2025 alone, talent is in short supply and bidding wars are the norm. A math teacher earning $30,000 rupees can see offers jump to $60,000 within months, especially from new rival schools that are desperate to staff up.

Founder-led schools tend to respond quickly to this churn. Two founders told Wally how they retain star faculty members and match job offers with pay bumps as high as 50%. But international school operators, bound by centralized processes and global norms typically stick to a 2 to 7% annual increase in line with their Western playbook. As a result, well-trained experienced teachers leave and classroom quality drops. And rebuilding that talent pipeline isn't easy, especially in a system that relies on teaching excellence to uphold its brand.

Also, schools in India are deeply promoter-led. The founder isn't just a figurehead. They're the school's face, heart and operating brain. teachers and parents alike base their view of the school around the culture the founder has built. So naturally, when founders exit post-acquisition, it harms trust. That's what makes post-acquisition transitions so fragile. In Western school systems, founders can exit without disrupting the soul of a school. Institutional structures, professional management and stable funding ensure continuity.

Not so much in India. According to a senior executive at a PE firm, at schools like Santa Maria where the original founders continue to retain a minority stake and remain involved in school affairs, things are better. The thing is, private equity ownership introduces a different kind of instability. No single person holds more than a 10% stake, meaning leadership changes are frequent. For instance, Santa Maria has cycled through three CFOs since the acquisition. And while private equity may not hold. hold back on spending, but where that money goes and where it doesn't reveals a skewed sense of priorities. For instance, an executive from Santa Maria told us that a new pickleball court

was installed post-acquisition when a better use of that investment would have been for teacher training programs. According to another executor from Glendale Academy, budgets were slashed post-acquisition, which resulted in old malfunctioning school buses, outdated computers, and aging dining hall facilities. This pattern, at least in some institutions, is telling. Standardized visual upgrades that photograph well took priority over less visible investments, such as training or transportation. The thing is, if private equity wants to uplift Indian education, it must adapt, not import.

Schools at the end of the day are long-term investments, which require nurturing for years to achieve returns. Many PE firms try to accelerate growth while cutting costs. but the combination often lowers quality and in the long run profits. The result is detrimental to all stakeholders involved. In fact, according to the founder of a rival school and seven students studying there, Cognita's acquisition of Cherec International School in Hyderabad is widely seen as a standout. They say that post-acquisition, staff attrition has been low,

academic culture has remained intact and student satisfaction has been high. This goes to show that when P. firms are focused on the long term, they can improve governance in the Indian school system. They can share best practices across their global school network and offer international opportunities for staff and student body alike. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium

podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Varghees and edited by Rajiv Sien.