Most feasibility studies on new school projects come back positive. That should concern an investor more than it usually does. The study is generally commissioned once the decision to proceed has already formed, and each dimension is assessed on its own terms. A project can clear every individual test and still be undeliverable.
GSE TELOS assesses a school project across five dimensions: Technical, Economic, Legal, Operational and Schedule. What it adds is the pattern across school projects specifically, which is that the dimension that kills a project is rarely the one the board spends its time on.
Technical: the constraint is people, not buildings
Technical feasibility gets read as a facilities question. Classrooms, laboratories, a sports hall, the network. Those are the easy part. They are procurable, and someone else has built one before.
The harder question is whether you can staff it. A Cambridge or IB programme needs teachers trained in that programme, and in most markets they are recruited internationally, against schools with an established reputation and a waiting list. A new school has neither. It is bidding for the same people from a standing start, in its first year, when its ability to pay is at its weakest and its story is hardest to tell.
Ask what the recruitment plan is for year one and year two, and which markets those teachers come from by name rather than by category. If the answer is that staff will be hired locally and trained, ask who trains them and against what standard, because the accreditation timetable will test it eventually.
The red flag here is a facilities specification with no curriculum decision behind it, or a curriculum chosen after the building was designed. The building follows the model.
Economic: test the ramp, not the mature year
Almost every model we are shown works in the mature year. That is what models are built to do. The question is whether it works in the years before the school fills.
A school opens with a fraction of its eventual enrolment and close to its eventual fixed cost. Leadership, core teaching staff, the campus and its running costs all arrive at once. Fee income arrives over several years. The gap between the two is the project.
So the economic test is not whether the mature margin looks attractive. It is whether funding is committed across the whole ramp, including the year in which enrolment growth disappoints. It usually does at least once, and the causes are often outside the school: a competitor opening early, a corporate relocation that does not happen, a currency move that changes what the parent market can pay.
Ask what the model does if year two enrolment lands twenty per cent below plan, and who funds the difference. If nobody has run that case, the model has not been tested.
Legal: the licence is the beginning
Legal feasibility is usually scoped to whether a licence can be obtained. It nearly always can, eventually, in almost every market. The provisions that decide the investment arrive afterwards.
Start with who is permitted to hold the licence, and whether that party controls the economics. In several markets the licence holder must be a national or a majority locally owned entity, which means a foreign investor’s return comes from the management position, the curriculum and the brand rather than from the shareholding. That is a different investment, and it needs to be understood before the structure is set rather than after. Thailand is the clearest current example.
Then the continuing obligations: minimum salary provisions, standard teacher contracts, curriculum approval, fee approval, and the conditions under which fees may be raised or admissions suspended. Saudi Arabia’s General Education Law puts most of its weight on the operating years rather than on licensing.
The red flag is a legal opinion that ends at the licence.
Operational: who runs it, and with what authority
Operational feasibility asks whether anyone in the structure has run a school of this type before, and whether that person has the authority to act on what they know.
Many projects have both capability and authority, held by different parties. An operator is appointed with responsibility for results, and no control over the appointment of the Head of School, the budget, or admissions policy. The outcome is predictable, and it is usually attributed to the operator.
Ask where each of these sits: appointment of the Head, academic policy, fee setting, admissions criteria, and the annual budget. Then ask who is accountable if the school underperforms, and what that accountability consists of in practice. The management contract is where those answers become enforceable, or fail to.
Schedule: the calendar does not move
Schedule is scored last and treated as the softest of the five. In school projects it is the hardest, because the academic year is fixed and families plan around it.
A commercial building that opens three months late opens three months late. A school that misses its intake does not open three months late. It opens a year late, because families have enrolled elsewhere and will not move their children mid-year. The cost is a full year of fee income against a full year of committed cost, and it lands in the year the project can least absorb it.
That is why construction delay in a school project is a revenue event rather than an inconvenience, and why the schedule assessment should run backwards from the intake date rather than forwards from the ground breaking.
Ask for the last responsible date on each dependency: licence, accreditation candidacy, appointment of the Head, teacher recruitment, marketing launch, admissions opening. Then ask which of them carries no float at all.
Scoring, and what the score is for
Each dimension can be scored simply, one to five, with a short written justification beside it. The scale is not the point and neither is the total.
The purpose of scoring is to force disagreement into the open. When board members and advisers score independently and then compare, the divergences are the useful output. One party scoring Legal at five and another at two means the two are working from different assumptions about the structure. That is worth an hour of discussion before it becomes worth a year of remediation.
A single blended score does the opposite. It hides the thing the study was commissioned to find.
| Dimension | The question it actually answers |
|---|---|
| Technical | Can we staff and equip this school to the standard the curriculum requires? |
| Economic | Is the project funded through the ramp, not just profitable at maturity? |
| Legal | Who holds the licence, and who controls the economics that follow from it? |
| Operational | Does the party accountable for results have the authority to deliver them? |
| Schedule | What happens to the investment if we miss one intake? |
The dimension that usually fails
Boards examine Economic hardest. It is quantified, it is the language of the room, and it is the dimension most advisers are equipped to argue about. Schedule and Operational are the ones that break projects.
The reason is procedural rather than intellectual. Those two are qualitative, they sit with people rather than with numbers, and they are easier to mark as satisfactory without evidence. A financial model that has not been stress tested gets sent back. An operational plan that has not been stress tested gets approved.
The practical correction is to assess Schedule and Operational first, while the meeting is still fresh, and to hold them to the same evidentiary standard as the model.
Questions for the board
- Which markets supply our teachers in year one, and what are we paying relative to the schools we are recruiting against?
- What does the model do if year two enrolment is twenty per cent below plan, and who funds that year?
- Who holds the licence, and does that party control fees, admissions and the appointment of the Head?
- What obligations begin after we open, and which of them are outside our control?
- What is the last responsible date for each dependency, and which has no float?
- If we miss the intake, what is the cost, and does our funding survive it?
The GSE view
A feasibility study is not a document produced to support a decision that has already been taken. It is the process of trying to break the project while breaking it is still cheap.
Used properly, TELOS makes sure all five ways a school project can fail are examined by someone whose job it is to find them, rather than four being examined and the fifth assumed. GSE runs this assessment as part of feasibility work on new schools, and the dimension that changes a client’s mind is almost never the one we were engaged to check.
Read next
- How to Conduct a Feasibility Study for a New School
- Why Most New School Projects Fail Financially
- What is a School Management Contract?
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