Baring Private Equity Asia took Nord Anglia private in 2008. Six schools, £190 million, 4.7 times EBITDA. Seventeen years later the same sponsor lineage is still there. The 2024 transaction that valued the business at $14.5 billion was not a sale in the ordinary sense. EQT and its partner rolled into a new vehicle, returned $5.4 billion to investors in the old one, and started the clock again.
Most owners approached about a sale carry an assumption borrowed from other sectors: private equity buys, improves and sells within three to five years. In schools that has stopped being true, and the gap between the stated model and the deal record changes what an owner should expect after completion.
What follows is what the record shows about holds, pricing, and the first year under new ownership. For the wider case for education as an asset class and where capital is flowing across the sector, see Private Equity in Education: What Investors Need to Know.
The hold period is longer than the pitch
Across private equity generally the hold has already stretched. Preqin put North American funds at an average 7.1 years in 2023. Bain’s 2025 data has the global average near seven, with around 40 per cent of portfolio companies now held five years or more, against 29 per cent in 2019.
Schools run longer still. There is no published education-specific hold dataset, so this rests on the deal record rather than on a sector statistic, and it should be read that way. But the record is consistent.
| Platform | Sponsor | Entry | Position now |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nord Anglia | Baring PE Asia, now EQT | 2008, 6 schools, 4.7x | Rolled over 2024, clock reset |
| ISP | Partners Group | 2013, founded it | 12 years, no exit |
| Cognita | Bregal, then KKR | 2004 and 2013 | Sold on 2018 to an evergreen owner |
| Inspired | TA, Warburg, Stonepeak, GIC | 2017 onwards | No exit, successive minority recaps |
| Globeducate | Providence | 2017 | Half sold 2024 to permanent capital |
| Busy Bees | Ontario Teachers’ | 2013 | 12 years, sale shelved |
The pattern is that liquidity arrives without a sale. Sponsors sell slices to pension funds, sovereign investors and long-hold vehicles, or they roll into a continuation fund and reset. Clean exits are the exception, and where they appear it is usually in smaller assets or minority positions.
For an owner deciding whether to sell, this matters more than the headline multiple. You are probably not selling to someone who intends to sell again in four years. The buyer is underwriting a decade or more, which changes what they will pay for, what they interrogate in diligence, and how much operational change arrives after completion.
Multiples, and the premium paid for the platform
There is a tidy line in circulation that single schools trade at 5 to 7 times and groups at 10 to 14. It does not appear in any published source, and it is best understood as a conflation of markets. It is roughly right where the singles are Western domestic schools and the groups are mid-sized platforms. It is wrong in premium Asian and Gulf markets, where a single school clears 10 times on its own.
The market-specific quotes are more useful.
| Market and asset | Quoted range | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| US single schools and preschools | 4x to 7x | Broker guides |
| London freehold trading schools | 8x to 13x | Agency estimate |
| Asian single international schools | 10.6x to 12.0x | Transaction data |
| Scaled K-12 platforms, Asia | 14.8x to 18.1x | Transaction data |
| Listed global K-12 operators | 10.7x to 13.4x | Public market |
| Greater China listed K-12 | 8.8x to 9.2x | Public market |
On the Asian transaction data the platform premium is worth roughly four to six turns of EBITDA, and the adviser publishing it states the premium directly at 40 to 50 per cent.
Nord Anglia is the extreme version of that arbitrage. Bought at 4.7 times with six schools, marked at around 20 times with more than 80. Multiple expansion did a large share of the work before any operating improvement is counted.
Two cautions on the top of that range. The 20 times figure is a broker estimate, and the only confirmed number in that transaction is the enterprise value. The cleanest disclosed platform multiple in the sector is Globeducate’s, at around 17 times, published in its buyer’s own investor presentation. And the ceiling is visible. The Cognita process stalled in 2025 on an ask near €6 billion against FY24 EBITDA above £260 million, which puts the sought multiple at 18 to 20 times. Blackstone and CVC were the final bidders and neither closed. That is the market declining to pay 20 times rather than confirming it.
What the premium is actually paid for
From the operating side, the premium is not paid for the schools a group owns. It is paid for the group’s ability to absorb the next one. Central admissions that work in a new market, a curriculum standard that transfers, a bench of Heads deep enough to staff an acquisition, procurement that produces real savings at scale.
Buyers test whether that machinery exists, and a group of five schools that has never integrated a sixth does not price as a platform. It prices as five schools.
What changes in the first year
The fee line moves first, and the evidence on this is stronger than most people expect.
The best-designed study in the sector covers 88 private equity deals across 994 US for-profit colleges. Tuition jumps discontinuously in the year after the buyout, by roughly $1,600 to $3,300 per student. Enrolment growth only builds from year two. Profits roughly tripled.
The same signature shows up wherever it can be measured. Nord Anglia’s own filing ahead of its 2014 listing recorded fees rising 4 to 6 per cent a year, described as exceeding the median rate of inflation in its markets, while utilisation went from 68 to 79 per cent and EBITDA margin from 21 to 29 over three years. In Dutch childcare, a study of 9,500 centres found private equity ownership priced around 3.4 per cent above peers, with the premium concentrated where competition was thinnest. Cognita families were warned of two fee increases inside a single academic year in 2024. A US Senate Budget Committee inquiry opened in March 2026 into the two largest private equity-owned childcare providers, requesting records on how tuition increases are set and whether obligations to lenders and owners feed into pricing. That inquiry is a request for documents rather than a finding, and should be read as such.
The mechanism is inelasticity. Where fees are paid by an expatriate package, a government allowance or federal aid, price resistance is blunted, and pricing behaviour tracks that precisely.
Where the fee lever is capped
This is the part that matters most in the Gulf, and it is where the general pattern breaks.
Under a fee index of the kind KHDA operates in Dubai, ownership cannot drive above-market increases. The lever moves to rating upgrades, which unlock a higher band, and to premium new builds. Reddam House Sydney grew fees around 4.5 per cent a year over eight years under a group owner, below the roughly 6 per cent Australian private school average.
An investor modelling a fee-capped market on evidence drawn from uncapped ones will overstate the return and mistime it. Value in a capped market is built through occupancy, mix and regulatory rating, and all three take longer than a fee reset.
Costs, and the Head
Cost behaviour reads as a sustained operating posture rather than a year-one cut. Staff cost gaps between for-profit chains and non-profits run 10 to 14 per cent of turnover in UK childcare, and private equity ownership correlates with materially higher staff turnover.
What moves quickly is leadership. No dataset tracks Head turnover after school acquisitions specifically, so this is inference from proxies rather than measurement. But the proxies point one way. The only peer-reviewed work linking ownership to tenure puts Heads at for-profit international schools at 3.3 years on average against 5.4 at not-for-profits. Across private equity generally, 58 per cent of chief executives are replaced within two years of a buyout, and 71 per cent of acquired companies change chief executive during the hold. Departures are usually framed as retirements.
This is the change that costs a school the most and appears nowhere in the model. A Head who built the enrolment relationships in a market leaves, and the admissions pipeline goes with them for a year. Any owner selling into a group should assume the appointment is no longer theirs, and any buyer should have a named successor before completion rather than after it.
The rest of the first-year signature
Reporting cadence arrives before anything else, usually weekly reviews of fees, enrolment forecasts and marketing at chief executive level. Marketing spend appears at schools that never advertised. Central procurement and shared services follow. The acquisition pipeline switches on immediately, and it is worth noting how heavily these platforms grow by buying rather than building. Nord Anglia’s growth under its first sponsor was 19 acquired schools against two greenfield.
Balance sheet moves run in parallel rather than in sequence. Acquisition leverage is there from day one. Sale and leaseback tends to come mid-hold. Dividend recapitalisations come later.
The published accounts of a single group-owned school show what that does to a profit and loss account. Nord Anglia’s Dublin school reported operating profit up 84 per cent to €918,513 on revenue of €12.85 million for the year to August 2025. It still recorded a pre-tax loss of €1.32 million, after interest of €2.24 million, of which €1.56 million was lease liabilities and the remainder was owed to group companies. Accumulated losses stood at €24.3 million, with the parent confirming it would not call the intragroup debt until the school could pay.
The school works. The structure above it consumes the result. Any owner assessing an offer from a leveraged group should understand that this is the accounting their school is being bought into, and any investor benchmarking a school’s profitability against a group-owned comparable should read the operating line rather than the bottom one.
What makes buyers walk away
Four things kill school transactions, and they are not evenly weighted.
Regulatory and fee control
The best-documented deal killer at market level. China’s 2021 rules on foreign ownership of compulsory education forced divestments and repriced the entire market, and listed Chinese K-12 still trades in a discount band. Dubai’s 2018 fee freeze prompted GEMS to shelve a London listing valued at $4.5 to 5 billion. The UK’s introduction of VAT on fees was named as a factor in the collapse of the Cognita talks.
The logic is direct. A fee cap removes the lever a buyer intends to pull in year one, so the asset is priced accordingly.
Safeguarding
Binary, reputational, and priced brutally where it is visible. An ASX-listed childcare operator lost around a quarter of its market value in a fortnight in 2025 after a single former educator was charged, with at most five of 399 centres involved.
In private transactions these issues rarely produce a named broken deal, which is itself informative. They surface as indemnities and price reductions, or the buyer withdraws quietly. Transaction lawyers treat historical safeguarding failure as the most severe red flag in school diligence, and the specific tests are documented: referral compliance, and whether any settlement agreement was used in a way that suppressed a disclosure.
Quality of earnings
Roughly 47 per cent of failed lower mid-market deals die on diligence findings, with EBITDA discrepancies alone accounting for 21 per cent. The school-specific versions are consistent: discount and scholarship leakage, where enrolment grows faster than tuition revenue; deferred fee recognition; sibling discount opacity; related-party leases at non-market rents in founder-owned schools; and collection quality.
The last of those is worth dwelling on for anyone preparing a school for sale. Fees invoiced are not fees collected, and a school carrying long-dated receivables is quietly restating its own EBITDA.
Structural and transfer risk
Licences and accreditation frequently do not transfer on change of control, which can remove a market segment for months while the buyer reapplies. Beyond that: founder and Head dependence, enrolment concentrated in a single nationality or employer, short leases, and deferred maintenance, where the working rule is that a dollar deferred becomes up to four dollars of capital renewal.
The pattern underneath
Buyers seldom walk over a single bad number. They walk when diligence shows that the two levers they intended to pull, fees and enrolment, are constrained. A cap, a shrinking cohort, a licence that will not move, or earnings quality that means the entry multiple was calculated on the wrong EBITDA. Safeguarding is the exception, and it stops a deal regardless of how the model looks.
Who you sell to decides what happens next
The multiple is the part sellers focus on and the part that matters least a year later.
A leveraged fund with a five-year horizon behaves differently from a pension fund holding directly. Busy Bees under Ontario Teachers’ described a first year of governance build-out and follow-on capital, with the operating team largely left alone. That is not how a fee reset and a weekly enrolment review feel from inside a school.
For an owner who built the school and intends to stay in the market, the question worth answering before the process starts is which of these you can live with. The answer changes who you approach, not just what you accept.
What this means in practice
Four things follow from the record above.
First, model the hold honestly. If your co-investor is a long-hold platform, your liquidity assumptions and theirs are different, and that difference belongs in the shareholders’ agreement rather than being discovered later.
Second, price the platform premium as an operating question. It is paid for integration capability, which is testable before completion.
Third, in a fee-capped market, discount any return model built on price. The lever is occupancy, mix and rating, and it works on a longer timeline.
Fourth, treat the Head appointment as a transaction term. It is the fastest-moving change after completion and the one with the clearest link to enrolment.
GSE has launched and managed 39 school projects across 16 countries, and sits on the board of the schools it manages under agreements with a ten-year minimum term. If you are weighing an offer for a school, or assessing one to buy, talk to us.