In March 2025 Nord Anglia Education changed hands at USD 14.5bn. It is the largest transaction in the history of international schooling and it sits at the top of every valuation range quoted in the sector, including the ranges GSE publishes in its International School M&A Transactions Directory.
The seller was BPEA Private Equity Fund VI. The buyer was BPEA Private Equity Fund VIII. Both are EQT funds. The same manager stood on both sides of the trade, alongside the incoming investors in the consortium.
EQT has held Nord Anglia since 2008. CPP Investments joined in 2017. What happened in 2025 was a transfer between two vehicles run by the same house, with new capital brought in around it.
It is not an isolated structure
The IMG Academy acquisition in June 2023 went through BPEA Private Equity Fund VIII, the same fund that went on to acquire Nord Anglia itself two years later. That makes it a platform bolt-on rather than a standalone education transaction, and the USD 1.25bn headline should be read as such.
In April 2025 Indochina Academy traded at USD 230m to Navis and TPG NewQuest through a continuation structure. The sellers’ own successor vehicles stood on the buy side.
Grupo Salta in Brazil has done it twice. In February 2024 Atmos Capital and Mission Co. bought 32 per cent from Gera Capital’s first fund while Warburg Pincus topped up. In November 2025 Gera and Opportunity bought the whole of Warburg Pincus’s holding. Existing holders sat on both sides of two consecutive trades.
What happened when a process was genuinely contested
Cognita ran a competitive sale toward roughly EUR 6bn and abandoned it in 2025 after bids fell short of the ask. No transaction completed. What followed was a retrenchment: twelve UK schools sold to Outcomes First Group, and a UK estate that stood at 39 schools in April 2025 down to about 20 by September through further sales and four closures.
So the sector holds two pieces of evidence from roughly the same period. A related-party trade printed at USD 14.5bn. An open process did not clear at all.
What this does and does not mean
None of this suggests mispricing. Continuation vehicles and fund-to-fund transfers are ordinary instruments. They generally carry limited partner consent, an independent fairness opinion, and secondary buyers who underwrite the asset on their own account. Money moved and the price was real.
The point is narrower. A mark struck between affiliated vehicles is weaker evidence of what an unrelated buyer would pay than a mark produced by a contested process. It reflects a manager’s view of its own asset, the financing available at the time, and the appetite of the incoming investors it chose to bring in. It does not reflect a field of bidders competing.
That matters more in this sector than in most, because the evidence base is thin. Of the 101 entries in the GSE directory, twelve carry any financial disclosure and only five give an EBITDA amount. When the anchor at the top of a thin range is set by a related-party trade, everything underwritten against it inherits the weakness. The valuation methodologies are only as good as the comparables fed into them.
The re-rating arc is built from two different kinds of evidence
Nord Anglia went from USD 4.3bn in April 2017 to USD 14.5bn in March 2025, a 3.4 times re-rating in eight years. Both endpoints are party-published, which is why the arc is quoted so often.
The two endpoints were produced differently. The 2017 figure was a take-private of a listed company at USD 32.50 a share, a price tested against a public market and an independent shareholder base. The 2025 figure was not tested that way. Reading the two as a single continuous measure of how the market has repriced premium schooling overstates what the second number can carry.
What to do with it
When a vendor or an adviser presents a comparable, two questions settle how much weight it deserves. Were the buyer and the seller related, whether through common ownership, a continuation vehicle or an existing shareholding. And was the process contested, or was the price agreed between parties who were already at the table.
A comparable that fails both tests is still information. It is not the same information as a competitive clearing price, and it should not be carried into a model at the same weight. The same discipline applies to exit planning, where the comparable you expect to be valued against determines what you build toward.
GSE grades every figure in its transaction directory by the strength of its source, and publishes the count of underlying observations so anyone using the ranges can see how thin the evidence is. The related-party question is the next layer down, and it applies to figures that are otherwise as well sourced as anything in the sector.
Read next
- International School M&A Transactions Directory. Every transaction named above, with its grade and its sources.
- Private Equity in Education: What Investors Need to Know. Deal architecture, hold periods and what institutional capital underwrites.
- What Happens When Private Equity Buys a School. Hold periods, the first year under new ownership and what kills transactions in diligence.
- How to Value an International School. The methodologies the comparables feed into.
- EBITDA Benchmarks: How Profitable Are International Schools?. Margin evidence across the sector.