From a single Embassy District campus to Beijing's longest-serving British school

The British School of Beijing, Sanlitun opened on 29 March 2004, having been founded in 2003. It was the first British school in the capital, and it has never left its original address at 5 Xiliujie, Sanlitun Road in the Chaoyang District, a few streets from the Embassy quarter that would define its character.

Origins

Nord Anglia Education, already operating British-curriculum schools across Europe and Asia, backed the venture. The Sanlitun site served the expatriate families concentrated in downtown Beijing, and from the outset the school pitched itself at the diplomatic and corporate community clustered around the Embassy District. It was, as the school itself puts it, the capital's only British international school in the city centre.

For its first six years, Sanlitun was the entirety of the British School of Beijing. In 2009, Nord Anglia opened a second campus in Shunyi, on the suburban fringe of the city, catering to the large expatriate housing compounds there. Both sites ran under the single banner of The British School of Beijing, operated together as one school.

Separation and growth

That arrangement held for four years. In 2013, the two campuses were administratively made into separate institutions, each with its own identity and leadership. The Sanlitun school kept its Early Years and Primary focus, serving children from age one to Year 6. Shunyi took on secondary education up to Year 13, offering IGCSEs and the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme. The split clarified what each site was built to do.

A formal agreement between the two schools means Year 6 graduates at Sanlitun transfer automatically into Year 7 at Shunyi, giving families a continuous pathway from nursery to the IB without switching providers.

Curriculum and identity

The curriculum follows the Early Years Foundation Stage for children aged one to four, and the National Curriculum for England through Key Stages 1 and 2. Years 5 and 6 add more specialist teaching, including Science and Humanities, along with an enrichment programme. Mandarin runs across all year groups, with Heritage and Advanced tracks available; German is offered as an option from Years 1 to 6. An EAL programme means no minimum level of English is required for admission.

The school holds accreditation under the British Schools Overseas inspection programme, administered through Penta International and approved by the Department for Education. It is a member of COBIS, FOBISIA, and WIDA. Nord Anglia's wider academic partnerships bring Apple, MIT, and The Juilliard School into the curriculum; the campus has a dedicated MIT Maker Space and a Juilliard keyboard room. Specialist facilities also include a rooftop playground, rock climbing wall, dance studio, drama studio, and cookery room.

More than 60 percent of teachers hold UK or Irish qualifications. Every class runs with both a class teacher and a teaching assistant, producing a school-wide ratio of 1:10, as noted by Wikipedia's entry on the British School of Beijing. Class sizes cap at 20 in primary, and 15 in Pre-Nursery and Nursery.

Present day

BSB Sanlitun enrolls up to 700 pupils drawn from more than 60 nationalities. Principal Joanne Prabhu leads the school. It celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2023, still on the same Sanlitun Road site where it first opened. As the Good Schools Guide records, it holds BSO, COBIS, and FOBISIA memberships and remains the only British international school operating in downtown Beijing.

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