Wellington's China Schools Sweep the 2026 Forbes Rankings

All six of Wellington College Education's China campuses earned places in the 2026 HSBC | Forbes China International School Annual Selection, according to the group's China website. Wellington College International Shanghai topped the national rankings in all three school divisions: primary, middle and high school.

Wellington College International Tianjin and Wellington College International Hangzhou also claimed first place in their respective cities. Alongside the Wellington campuses, Hiba Academy, which operates under a shared China partnership structure, placed fifth nationally at primary level in Shanghai and first in Hangzhou in the same division. All schools were assessed on academic achievement, teaching quality, campus facilities, and innovation and development.

What the Forbes selection measures

The HSBC | Forbes China selection has become one of the more closely watched annual benchmarks for international and bilingual schools on the mainland, carrying weight with the Chinese-national families who now make up the majority of students at many Shanghai and Hangzhou campuses. For Wellington, whose China schools operate a bilingual stream alongside international-passport holders, performing well here is a different signal from an ISI or CIS accreditation: it speaks directly to the domestic premium market that has driven growth since the sector's 2021 regulatory restructuring.

That restructuring required schools to separate Chinese-national students into compliant bilingual streams rather than enrolling them directly into foreign-curriculum classes. In the years since, bilingual schools that can demonstrate outcomes comparable to international schools have pulled ahead of those that could not adapt. Wellington's clean sweep across three cities suggests the group navigated that transition more effectively than most of its British-brand peers.

The competitive picture

Wellington is not the only British group investing heavily in Shanghai and Beijing campuses: Dulwich, Harrow and Nord Anglia have all expanded on the mainland in recent years. But the breadth of Wellington's 2026 result stands out. Three first-place city rankings in a single year, across a network of six schools and two separate brand families, is unusual in a sector where positions typically vary considerably by level and location.

For families weighing options in Shanghai specifically, the rankings reinforce an already strong position for Wellington College International Shanghai. The school offers both the IB Diploma and A Levels in its senior years, a dual-pathway approach that has helped it recruit across different family backgrounds. Whether that dual structure also accounts for its breadth of performance across the Forbes assessment criteria is something rival operators will be studying.