Asia
British Schools Race to Open Vietnam Campuses as UK Names Country a Priority Market
Rugby School, Uppingham and Cranleigh are among the brands preparing Vietnamese campuses for 2026, as London formally designates Vietnam one of five global education export priorities.
Vietnam is emerging as the most active frontier for British international school expansion in Southeast Asia, with several marquee UK independent schools now in the final stages of opening local campuses. According to Vietnam.vn, Uppingham School's Hung Yen campus is expected to open in August 2026, while Rugby School is planning a new Hanoi campus for September of the same year. Cranleigh School, meanwhile, was expected to announce its first Vietnamese location in June.
The wave of openings follows a January 2026 announcement in which the UK government launched a new International Education Strategy with a target of growing education exports to £40 billion by 2030. Vietnam was identified as one of five priority markets, with transnational education, which includes operating schools on the ground, cited as the primary delivery model.
Why Vietnam, why now
Sir Steve Smith, the UK government's International Education Ambassador, told local media that Vietnam qualifies as a priority because the Vietnamese government actively supports education internationalisation, the domestic market is large enough to sustain multiple operators, and a viable commercial model exists that allows schools to avoid losses from the outset. That combination is less reliably present in other high-demand Southeast Asian markets, making Vietnam unusually attractive to risk-conscious UK operators.
ISC Research data cited in the report shows that from 2020 to early 2025, the number of international schools in Vietnam rose by 24 percent to 359 institutions, while student numbers grew 28 percent to nearly 146,000. Those figures predate the current cohort of openings, meaning the market is likely to look considerably larger by the time the 2026-2027 school year is fully under way.
An increasingly British landscape
Alongside the incoming names, established British operators including Sedbergh Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City and Brighton College in Hanoi have been present for several years, giving newer entrants a competitive benchmark to work against. Ardingly College Vietnam also formally announced its operation in Lao Cai earlier in 2026. The clustering of British brands in a single market within a single year is unusual even by the standards of Southeast Asia's fast-moving international school sector, and will test whether parental demand in Vietnam is broad enough to sustain all of them at viable enrolment levels.