Hong Kong · History
From Aberdeen prep to full K-13: Wycombe Abbey's Hong Kong story
Opened in September 2019 with fifty pupils in a renovated Tin Wan building, Wycombe Abbey School Hong Kong has grown into a two-campus school serving Year 1 through Year 13.
The original Wycombe Abbey was founded on the day of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1896, in the Buckinghamshire market town of High Wycombe. For more than a century it remained a single-site girls' boarding school. Internationalisation came late but moved fast. Wycombe Abbey International was established in 2015, and by 2016 the first overseas campus had opened in Changzhou, China, operated by BE Education, a Hong Kong-based consultancy founded in 2003 by former Eton pupil William Vanbergen. Hong Kong followed three years later.
Origins
The school opened on 5 September 2019 at 17 Tin Wan Street in Aberdeen, on the south side of Hong Kong Island. It was a co-educational day school for children aged five to ten, and the Hong Kong outpost was, as WhichSchoolAdvisor noted at the time, the second international opening for the Wycombe Abbey group, arriving three years after Changzhou.
Howard Tuckett was appointed founding headmaster. He had spent twenty years as an Independent Association of Prep Schools head and had also worked as an Independent Schools Inspectorate inspector. The first term began with fifty pupils; the roll reached eighty before Christmas. That early momentum was then interrupted: civil unrest in late 2019 and the arrival of COVID-19 in early 2020 disrupted the school's second and third terms, as it did every school in the city.
The Tin Wan building was purpose-fitted for the school. Its centrepiece is a three-storey glass-roofed atrium used for student activities and extracurricular pursuits. A climbing wall reaches fifteen metres, and a rooftop sports field of roughly 20,000 square feet carries artificial turf and an outdoor running track. Dedicated rooms serve drama, music, art, science, and iSTEAM.
Backers and governance
The school sits within Wycombe Abbey International, chaired by Patrick Sherrington, a barrister who served as chair of the UK school's governing body from 2008 to 2019 and sits as a Deputy High Court judge in Hong Kong. On the advisory board, CTF Education Group, part of the Chow Tai Fook family's wider education portfolio, holds a prominent position: Adrian Cheng, founder of K11 and a Vice-chairman of CTF Education Group, is advisory board co-chairman. Jennifer Yu Cheng, Deputy Vice Chairwoman of CTF Education Group, is also named in the school's leadership. BE Education runs day-to-day operations, as it does across the wider Wycombe Abbey Asia network.
Curriculum and identity
From the outset the school delivered a bespoke curriculum built on the English National Curriculum, to which a substantial Chinese language strand was added. Chinese is taught as a discrete subject in every year group, with roughly equal lesson time given to English, Chinese, and mathematics each week. The Chinese syllabus was drawn in part from the approach developed at Wycombe Abbey's Changzhou campus. The prep school covers fourteen subjects in total and runs a Secondary and Boarding School Guidance Programme designed to place pupils into selective UK independent schools. Among the first cohort of leavers recorded publicly, one 2026 graduate gained a place at Cheltenham Ladies' College and another at Wetherby Pembridge.
Senior school expansion
For the school's first six years, Hong Kong families who wanted to continue with Wycombe Abbey after Year 8 had to look elsewhere. That changed in August 2025, when the school opened a senior school at a second campus: 83 Sa Po Road at The Billionaire Royale in Kowloon City. The senior school covers Years 9 to 13. Students in Years 9 and 10 sit IGCSEs; those in Years 12 and 13 take A Levels. The school positions the A Level pathway explicitly as an alternative to the International Baccalaureate. Mandatory modules in entrepreneurship and iSTEAM sit alongside the core subject offer. Mandarin continues as a key language throughout.
The two-campus structure gives the school a full Year 1-to-13 pathway, all within the British curriculum tradition: English National Curriculum in the prep years, then IGCSE and A Level in the senior school.
Present day
The school currently enrols around 250 pupils across both sites. The prep school remains at Tin Wan, Aberdeen; the senior school operates from Kowloon City. The school has been reviewed by the Good Schools Guide International and was a winner of the 2025 Greater Bay Area STEAM Education Award. A Singapore campus, developed with BE Education and Wee Hur Holdings, is planned to open in September 2028, extending the Wycombe Abbey Asia network further.