Britannica International School Shanghai: British-owned since 2013

Britannica International School Shanghai opened in September 2013 at 1988 Gubei Road in Puxi. The legal entity had been registered a year earlier, in September 2012, but teaching began the following autumn. The campus sits within a ten-minute drive of Xujiahui CBD, placing it among the most centrally located international schools in the city.

Origins and the Orbital connection

The school was founded by Orbital Education, a group headquartered in Cheshire and established in 2008 by Kevin McNeany. McNeany is the serial education entrepreneur who founded Nord Anglia Education in 1972, built it into a major international school operator, and led it to a London Stock Exchange listing in 1997 before stepping down in 2005. Orbital is his third significant education venture, and Britannica Shanghai is its sole campus in China.

Alun Thomas served as the school's founding principal. The current principal is Paul Farrell, a Glasgow-born physicist and mathematician who studied at the University of Strathclyde before moving into international education, with leadership roles in Romania, Dubai and London preceding his arrival in Shanghai.

Curriculum and identity

Britannica's core identity rests on a single claim, stated plainly by its parent group: it is the only school in Shanghai that is British-owned, with fully trained teachers from the British Isles. The school runs the English National Curriculum from the Early Years Foundation Stage through to IGCSE and A Level, catering for students aged two to eighteen. It operates as a Cambridge International Examinations centre and offers Edexcel alongside Cambridge qualifications at IGCSE.

Mandarin is compulsory for all students up to Year 9, with five lessons a week plus additional provision for native speakers. Beyond Mandarin, the World Languages Programme covers Korean, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian and Hebrew, all taught by specialist native-speaking teachers. The programme was shortlisted for a TES Award for International Schools in 2025 in the Best Curriculum Initiative category, with principal Paul Farrell crediting the breadth of languages and the pastoral support of specialist teachers.

Class sizes run between twelve and fifteen pupils, sometimes lower, which the school uses as a structural selling point against larger competitors in the Shanghai market. Over 100 co-curricular activities run each week, from football, rugby and swimming to expressive arts. The school was the first internationally ASA-affiliated swim school in Shanghai, a distinction noted on its membership records. A campus upgrade, undertaken during a recent summer break, added a dedicated STEM Centre.

Accreditation

In December 2020, Britannica announced it had become, by its own account, the only international school in Shanghai to hold full accreditation from both COBIS, the Council of British International Schools, and CIS, the Council of International Schools, simultaneously. It is also inspected under the British Schools Overseas scheme by the Independent Schools Inspectorate; the most recent ISI visit took place on 25 February 2025, the school's first BSO accreditation inspection. The DfE's UK schools register records the school as open from that date under principal Paul Farrell, with URN 151904. Britannica is additionally a member of ACAMIS, the Association of China and Mongolia International Schools.

Present day

Current enrolment stands at 410 pupils against a stated maximum capacity of 750 to 800. Orbital Education's wider network now spans schools in Hungary, Slovenia, Spain, Qatar, Ecuador and Mexico, with Britannica Shanghai as the group's only Chinese campus. The school draws students from around 40 nationalities and offers post-16 A Level provision, one of the few institutions in Shanghai to do so as a standalone British school rather than as part of a larger international group.

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