I Want to Build a School in Space

I should probably clarify something straight away.

I have no intention of building a school in space.

No launchpad. No orbiting campus. No zero-gravity classrooms.

But the idea matters more than the reality.

Because the moment you seriously ask yourself, “What would a school in space actually require?”, something interesting happens.

Your thinking changes.

Most conversations about school design, school planning, and school development begin with constraints.

Budget
Regulation
Accreditation
Timetables
Staffing models
Curriculum frameworks
Parent expectations
Investor return profiles

By the time the first planning meeting is over, creativity has already been quietly escorted out of the room.

This happens in international schools.
It happens in new school start-ups.
It happens in feasibility studies and master planning workshops.

And it happens long before a single brick is laid.

Designing a school in space ignores all of that.

Space does not care about:

• Traditional classrooms
• Standard school days
• Bells, periods, and timetables
• Familiar teaching roles
• “How schools have always been run”

Instead, it forces a different mode of thinking.

This kind of thinking is not new. It is the same first-principles approach used by people like Elon Musk when working in environments where inherited assumptions are liabilities rather than assets.

When legacy thinking is stripped away, the questions change.

What knowledge genuinely matters?

What skills are essential when environments are complex, high-risk, and constantly changing?

How do people learn best when certainty is removed?

What does leadership look like when hierarchy alone is not enough?

What does governance look like when decision-making must be clear, fast, and accountable?

Suddenly, education is no longer about content delivery.

It becomes about capability, judgement, adaptability, and resilience.

Here is the important part.

Once you have designed a school for space, bringing it back to Earth becomes much easier.

Because when you do this exercise properly, you start to see things that were previously hidden.

Do students really need to spend most of their day sitting still?

Do academic subjects need to remain siloed when real-world problems are integrated?

Do assessment systems measure understanding, or simply compliance?

Are schools preparing young people for certainty, or for uncertainty?

These are not abstract questions.

They sit at the heart of modern school strategy, school leadership, governance frameworks, and long-term school performance.

They also sit at the heart of education investment decisions.

In our work advising school owners, boards, and investors, this is often where the breakthrough happens.

Not by copying an existing school model.
Not by importing a brand and hoping it fits.
Not by forcing a curriculum into a context it was never designed for.

This way of thinking has informed our education master planning work on large-scale projects designed for environments that do not yet exist, including Qiddiya, delivered under contract to the Public Investment Fund.

Large international school groups such as Nord Anglia Education, ISP, GEMS and Cognita have demonstrated how scale, governance, and consistency can be achieved across markets.

The next challenge for the sector is different.

It is not scale alone, but adaptability.
Not replication, but relevance.
Not familiarity, but future readiness.

That requires temporarily removing assumptions.

When the impossible version is designed first, it becomes far easier to see which constraints are genuinely regulatory, financial, or operational and which are simply inherited habits of thinking.

Only then does a school feasibility study become meaningful.
Only then do decisions about curriculum, staffing, facilities, and capital investment align.
Only then does vision translate into something operational, governable, and investable.

This approach matters whether you are:

• Launching a new international school
• Expanding an existing school into a new market
• Planning a premium, mid-market, or impact-focused education project
• Assessing risk and return for education investors
• Rethinking leadership and governance structures in a growing school group

The most successful schools are rarely the ones that ask the safest questions at the beginning.

They are the ones who asked better ones.

So no, I am not building a school in space.

But if you are serious about building schools that are future-ready, financially sustainable, and educationally credible, it is a surprisingly effective place to start thinking from.

Because once you have designed the impossible, designing something exceptional on Earth becomes far more achievable.

Explore Our Expert Insights

If you want to learn more about the steps required to set up a school, explore these essential resources: ✅ Steps to Setting Up a New School ✅ 10 Steps and Articles on How to Set Up a New School ✅ GSE International School Franchise Models

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