Hong Kong · History
From fifty pupils to a full British pathway across two campuses
Wycombe Abbey School Hong Kong opened in Aberdeen in September 2019 as a prep school. Six years on, it runs from Year 1 to Year 13 across two campuses, with IGCSEs and A Levels now on offer.
Wycombe Abbey School Hong Kong first opened its doors on 5 September 2019. During that first term, numbers grew from an initial fifty children to eighty by Christmas. It was a modest start for a name that carries considerable weight in British independent education.
The school is part of Wycombe Abbey International, a global family of schools established in 2015. Behind the network is BE Education, a premium education group founded in 2003 and headquartered in Hong Kong and Shanghai, which is the exclusive international partner of Wycombe Abbey in Asia. In 2015, BE Education's founder William Vanbergen signed a deal with Wycombe Abbey to open schools in China, leading to the rebranding of the Changzhou school to Wycombe Abbey. Hong Kong was the second international opening for the UK independent school, after the Changzhou campus launched in 2016.
The UK original was founded on the day of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, 23 September 1896, by Miss Frances Dove, an educational trailblazer who promoted equal opportunities for girls in the Victorian age. That school remains a selective girls' boarding school in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. The Hong Kong campus is a different proposition: a private, co-educational British school serving both local and expatriate families.
Campus and early years
The school is located on the south side of Hong Kong Island. Its address is 17 Tin Wan Street, Aberdeen, fifteen minutes by car from Hong Kong's Central Business District and twenty-two minutes from West Kowloon. The campus occupies a newly renovated building in Tin Wan with dedicated facilities for drama, music, art, science, and STEAM subjects. The atrium features a three-storey high climbing wall and a library stocked with 22,000 books.
Founding headmaster Howard Tuckett came to Hong Kong after spending thirteen years as head of prep at Caterham School in Croydon. Like all other schools in Hong Kong, the school suffered disruption in its early months from civil unrest and then the coronavirus pandemic. Despite that turbulent opening, the school established itself as one of a small number of British prep schools operating in the territory.
Curriculum and identity
The school follows the National Curriculum for England and Wales, with an emphasis on developing critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills. Its curriculum was designed to combine the National Curriculum for England with a Chinese language programme drawn from the Wycombe Abbey School Changzhou model in mainland China. The school puts equal emphasis on English and Chinese, with seven classes of each subject taught per week.
Fourteen subjects are taught from Year 1 to Year 8, including English, Chinese, Mathematics, Science, iSTEAM, History, Geography, Speech and Drama, Art and Design, Music, Physical Education, PSHE, and Religious Education. The school does not describe itself as an international school; it positions itself as a private school for all Hong Kong children, with no nationality or passport quotas restricting entry.
As of the time of writing, the school holds no independent international accreditation or external inspection affiliation from a recognised agency. It is registered with Hong Kong's Education Bureau.
Senior school expansion
In August 2025, Wycombe Abbey School Hong Kong expanded with the launch of its own senior school. The senior school, covering Years 9 to 13, follows the British educational pathway with IGCSEs in Years 9 to 10 and A Levels in Years 12 to 13. It is located at 83 Sa Po Road in Kowloon City. The expansion marks a key milestone in offering a full British education pathway from Year 1 through Year 13 in Hong Kong.
The first cohort will sit IGCSE exams in June 2027. Class sizes are kept intentionally small to support personalised learning, and the curriculum includes core subjects plus mandatory entrepreneurship and iSTEAM modules.
Present day
The school now operates across two campuses: the original prep site at Tin Wan, Aberdeen, for Years 1 to 8, and the new senior campus in Kowloon City for Years 9 to 13. Leavers in the past two years have won places at Wycombe Abbey UK, Eton College, Cheltenham Ladies' College, Abingdon, Benenden, Badminton, and Rugby, as well as at leading Hong Kong schools including Harrow Hong Kong, Chinese International School, and Hong Kong International School.
The school's parent network, Wycombe Abbey International, has a pipeline that now includes a campus in Bangkok opening in August 2026 and a new school in Singapore opening in 2028. Howard Tuckett, the founding headmaster, remains at the helm of the Hong Kong school.