From a rented villa to Vietnam's largest international school

In August 1997, a couple named Maurice and Rosie Nguyen opened a small pre-school inside a renovated villa on Nguyen Van Thu Street in District 1. They called it Tiny Tots. Their motivation was personal: they wanted a British-style early education for their one-year-old daughter, Jenny. Within months, the school had filled with children from the city's growing expatriate and Vietnamese professional communities, and demand quickly outpaced the villa's walls.

Origins

The Nguyens had started with roughly 60 children. A second pre-school, called Fundino, followed in District 3. By 2000, the original villa on Nguyen Van Thu had been extended to add ten primary classrooms, bringing the combined roll to around 300. That year the school was formally renamed the British International School Ho Chi Minh City. Also in 2000, the founders enlisted Nord Anglia Education, a UK-based school management company, to provide quality control and curriculum oversight, a relationship that would eventually reshape the school's ownership entirely.

Growth and campus expansion

Demand kept ahead of space. A purpose-built campus opened in the residential An Phu area of District 2, and with three sites now operating, total enrollment reached around 560. A separate secondary campus then opened on land adjacent to the An Phu primary site, and the roll crossed 1,000 students. The first sixth-form cohort graduated in 2006 and went on to university, marking the school's completion as a full through-school from nursery to Year 13.

The Tu Xuong primary campus in District 3 continued operating alongside the An Phu sites, but the school's centre of gravity was shifting to Thao Dien in District 2. In August 2010, according to the school's own 25th anniversary account, a dedicated secondary campus opened on land across from the An Phu primary building. The Tu Xuong campus later closed in 2018, with those students consolidated into the An Phu and Thao Dien sites.

In March 2015, Nord Anglia Education formally acquired BIS HCMC, along with the British Vietnamese International School the founders had launched in 2011 and two schools in Hanoi. BIS HCMC became part of a network of more than 80 premium international schools operating across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. Joining Nord Anglia brought the school collaborative programmes with The Juilliard School for music, MIT for STEAM, and UNICEF for global citizenship work.

In January 2018 the school opened a fourth site, a purpose-built Early Years and Infant Campus in Thao Dien designed along Reggio Emilia-inspired lines, with clustered classrooms, a wading pool, outdoor learning spaces and a rooftop garden. For the first time, all three age-group campuses sat within the same neighbourhood, with the Junior and Secondary buildings linked by a private overhead pedestrian bridge. The school, which had opened with 60 children in a villa, now approached 2,300 students from more than 55 countries.

Curriculum and accreditation

The English National Curriculum runs from Early Years through Key Stage 3. In primary, it is delivered alongside the International Primary Curriculum, with languages including French, Spanish, Mandarin and Vietnamese. Secondary students move into Cambridge IGCSE in Years 10 and 11, then choose between the IB Diploma Programme and A Levels in Years 12 and 13. The school is a designated IB World School, a registered Cambridge International Examinations centre and a full member of the Federation of British International Schools in Asia.

On accreditation, the school holds two independent marks. It is fully accredited by the Council of International Schools, which evaluates teaching, leadership and student wellbeing against internationally agreed standards and requires re-inspection every few years. It is also inspected under the British Schools Overseas framework administered by the UK Department for Education. The most recent published BSO results rated the school outstanding in all categories, a distinction the school notes is held by few institutions worldwide. University destinations in 2025 included Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London, Stanford and Cornell.

Present day

BIS HCMC today enrolls around 2,300 students aged 2 to 18 across its three Thao Dien campuses. Simon Higham, who joined the wider BIS community in 2009 as primary deputy headteacher and later served as principal of the British Vietnamese International School, took over as principal in August 2025. The school's auditorium on the Secondary Campus was renamed the Founders Auditorium in February 2023 at a ceremony attended by Maurice Nguyen and Rosie Ngo, the couple who started it all with a converted villa and sixty children twenty-six years earlier.

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