Yew Chung: Hong Kong's original homegrown international school, since 1932

Yew Chung Education Foundation's own history records that the school was founded in 1932 by Madam Tsang Chor-hang, originally as a kindergarten and primary school in Hong Kong. It predates every international school in the territory that came from abroad, which is why YCIS today describes itself as the first homegrown international school in Hong Kong.

Origins

Madam Tsang's founding purpose was to educate students beyond the conventional classroom and to instil what the school calls a sense of societal consciousness. The motto she chose — diligence, frugality, humility and faithfulness — reflected the constraints of the era as much as any educational ideal. The 1930s were turbulent for colonial Hong Kong, and the road to education was full of obstacles, but Madam Tsang kept the school running. It survived the Japanese occupation and the disruptions of the post-war years largely through her persistence.

The Second Generation

Leadership passed to Madam Tsang's daughter, Dr. Betty Chan Po-king, after Dr. Chan completed her studies in the United States. She returned to Hong Kong in the 1970s and immediately began reshaping the school's approach to early childhood education, championing the then-radical concept of learning through play and introducing open classrooms. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign later noted that Dr. Chan had studied early childhood education there and then went back to Hong Kong to expand the school from a nursery through the IB Diploma and eventually to the Chinese mainland. Her approach was considered avant-garde for Hong Kong in the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when kindergartens were broadly seen as places for singing and crafts rather than structured developmental learning.

Dr. Chan also expanded the Yew Chung Children's House and Kindergarten to multiple campuses across Hong Kong during this period, establishing the multi-site footprint the school still holds.

Growth and the International Turn

The school's pivotal structural shift came in 1987, when Yew Chung International School-Primary was established, formalising an international curriculum while retaining its dual-language heritage. The trigger was pragmatic: parents whose children had passed through the Yew Chung kindergarten did not want them transferring to other primary schools. The primary section expanded year by year from a small cohort of founding students. By 1993, the Secondary Section was introduced, completing a seamless pathway from early childhood to Year 13.

With Hong Kong's 1997 handover approaching, the 1980s and early 1990s sharpened Yew Chung's thinking about what genuine international education meant in a city positioned between East and West. The answer the school settled on was co-teaching: every classroom paired one Western and one Chinese teacher, and every campus was jointly led by two Co-Principals, one from each tradition. This model became the institution's most distinctive structural feature and its primary selling point to families who wanted their children genuinely bilingual and bicultural, rather than simply English-medium with a Chinese-language class bolted on.

The success in Hong Kong created demand on the mainland during the 1990s. YCIS Shanghai opened in 1993 as the first independent international school officially recognised and registered by the Chinese government. YCIS Beijing followed in 1995. Schools in Chongqing and Qingdao opened in 2002 and 2006 respectively; a campus in Silicon Valley launched in 2002 as well. The Hong Kong school remained the network's flagship.

Curriculum and Accreditation

YCIS Hong Kong's academic structure runs from an Infant and Toddler programme at six months through to Year 13. In the lower secondary years the school follows its own bilingual curriculum rooted in the National Curriculum for England. Years 10 and 11 sit Cambridge IGCSE examinations; Years 12 and 13 take the IB Diploma Programme, for which the school received IB World School authorisation on 16 June 2000. A pre-IB bridging course is available to late-joining students preparing for Year 12.

Students are taught Mandarin Chinese and English from kindergarten, with French available as an additional language in secondary. The co-teaching model means that in early childhood and primary classrooms, a Western teacher and a Chinese teacher share the room simultaneously. In practical terms, Yew Chung preschool classrooms carry an English-primary teacher, a Cantonese-primary teacher, and a Mandarin teacher who comes in once a week.

YCIS Hong Kong holds full accreditation from the Council of International Schools (CIS), formalised in 2015 for the secondary section, and is also accredited by COBIS. It is registered as a private independent school with the Hong Kong Education Bureau. Around 54 percent of IB Diploma graduates earn the Bilingual Diploma, a figure the school treats as a direct measure of its founding mission.

Campus and Present Day

The school operates nine campuses: eight clustered in Kowloon Tong, serving primary and secondary students, and one in Tseung Kwan O dedicated to early childhood education, which opened in 2020. The Kowloon Tong sites are spread across Somerset Road, Kent Road, To Fuk Road, and Waterloo Road. A Madam Tsang Chor-hang Heritage Museum has been opened on the Kowloon Tong campus, tracing the school's history since 1932 with student ambassadors conducting bilingual guided tours.

Current enrolment stands at around 2,200 students from more than 30 countries and regions, taught by faculty drawn from more than 20 nationalities. The school is the flagship of the Yew Chung Yew Wah Education Network, which spans campuses in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Qingdao, and Silicon Valley. Leadership is shared between Western Co-Education Director and Co-Executive Principal Martin Scott and Chinese Co-Education Director and Co-Executive Principal Shannon Shang, a direct expression of the co-principalship model the school has practised since the 1990s.

The Yew Chung Education Foundation has also extended the institution's reach into higher education. The Yew Chung Community College, established in 2008, was upgraded in 2018 to the Yew Chung College of Early Childhood Education. In 2024 that college became the first private higher education institution in Hong Kong to offer a Postgraduate Diploma in Education in ECE and a Master's Degree in Education at QF Level 6, meaning the organisation that started as a single kindergarten in 1932 now covers the full span from six months to postgraduate study.

Read the full Yew Chung International School of Hong Kong profile →