British School of Beijing: opened early in 2004, split in two by 2013

The British School of Beijing was meant to open in September 2004. It opened six months early, on 29 March 2004, at its first site in Sanlitun, in the Chaoyang district. Established in 2003 by the British Embassy as part of the King's Schools group, it was a founding member of the British Schools Foundation and set out to serve the growing community of foreign nationals in China's capital.

Origins and Early Years

The Sanlitun campus took students from Early Years through to secondary age, drawing children of embassy staff and multinational executives.

Demand from expatriate families in Shunyi, the district northeast of the city centre that had become Beijing's main expat residential area, drove the next step. The Shunyi campus opened in 2009 as the school's second site, and for the first four years Sanlitun and Shunyi were run as a single institution. By 2011, the combined school had 1,150 students from 50 countries. British nationals made up around 25 percent of the roll; mainland Europeans together accounted for another 30 percent, with North Americans forming the third-largest group. In 2013 the two campuses were made into separate schools, each with its own identity and leadership.

Nord Anglia and Expansion

The school was one of several British-branded international schools in China that moved to Nord Anglia Education, which now operates more than 80 schools in over 30 countries. Under Nord Anglia, BSB Shunyi grew to its current capacity of 1,500 students, drawn from over 60 nationalities including British, German, American, South Korean and Hong Kong families.

The Shunyi campus is at South Side, No. 9 An Hua Street, in the Tianzhu Development Zone. It runs from Early Years Foundation Stage through to Year 13, taking pupils from 18 months to 18 years, and is registered with the Beijing Municipal Education Commission as an international department school, which restricts enrolment to foreign passport holders.

Curriculum and Accreditation

Students follow the English National Curriculum from EYFS through Key Stage 4, sitting IGCSE examinations at 16. Post-16, students can take the IB Diploma Programme or, more recently, A-Levels. The school was authorised as an IB World School in May 2014, according to the IB's own registry.

A German Primary Programme runs alongside the main curriculum for native German-speaking students, reflecting the large German-speaking community among Beijing's expatriates. The programme follows the Thuringia Curriculum and the Kernlehrplan for Years 1 to 4, with pupils joining the rest of the school for non-German-language subjects.

BSB Shunyi holds British Schools Overseas status, inspected by the Independent Schools Inspectorate, an organisation approved by the UK's Department for Education. It is also accredited by the Council of British International Schools (COBIS), with its most recent COBIS inspection carried out in 2025. The school is a member of IAPS, the Independent Association of Prep Schools, and of ACAMIS, the Association of China and Mongolia International Schools. It is an approved Cambridge International Examinations testing centre and an Edexcel testing centre.

Post-16 results have been a consistent selling point. BSB Shunyi's average IB Diploma score of 37 sits well above the global average of 33. In both the 2021 and 2022 examination sessions, two students achieved a perfect score of 45 points. Graduates have gone on to Cambridge, Imperial College London, UCL, UC Berkeley, NYU, the University of Toronto and Seoul National University, among others.

Facilities and Global Partnerships

The Shunyi campus is a single site for EYFS, Primary and Secondary, with an air-purified sports dome, tennis and basketball courts, playing fields, science laboratories and a 300-seat theatre. Through the Nord Anglia network, the school runs curriculum collaborations with The Juilliard School for music, MIT for STEAM project work, and UNICEF for global citizenship programmes.

Present Day

The current Principal, Bevan, took up the post in August 2025. He joined BSB Shunyi in 2021 from a Nord Anglia role in Shanghai, serving as Head of Secondary and Vice Principal, and has been a member of the Asia Pacific IB Educator network since 2015. More than two decades after the school opened early in Sanlitun, the second campus it built for Shunyi's expatriate families now has room for 1,500 pupils.

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