Hong Kong
YK Pao School Opens in Hong Kong, Bringing a New Bilingual Model to the City
The prestigious Shanghai school brand has launched its first Hong Kong campus, offering a bilingual English-Chinese curriculum at fees well above the mid-market tier.
Hong Kong now has its first campus under the YK Pao School name, one of mainland China's most recognisable bilingual school brands. The school opened in September 2026 with Years 1 to 3 at a temporary site in Yau Tong, Kowloon East, ahead of a move to a permanent campus in Kowloon Tong, the former site of Kowloon Junior School, expected in 2028. According to YK Pao School, the inaugural cohort follows a bilingual English and Putonghua curriculum built around the IB Primary Years Programme pathway, with enhanced Chinese culture and mathematics instruction embedded throughout.
Annual fees for Years 1 to 3 in the 2026-27 academic year stand at HK$220,000, pending final Education Bureau approval. That positions YK Pao Hong Kong firmly in the upper tier of the city's private school market, above the majority of DSS schools and broadly in line with the lower end of the premium international segment.
What the arrival signals
YK Pao School was founded in Shanghai in 1994 and has operated as a flagship of the city's bilingual private sector for over three decades. Its decision to open in Hong Kong reflects a pattern that has been building since the city's government began encouraging more school provision in the post-pandemic period: mainland-linked education brands testing whether Hong Kong families, particularly those with cross-border ties, will pay a premium for an explicitly bilingual rather than purely English-medium experience.
The school's founding head is Cathy Braithwaite, who brings more than 27 years of experience from the UK system. That combination of a mainland Chinese school heritage and a British-trained leadership team mirrors the positioning YK Pao has pursued in Shanghai, where it competes at the top of a market that increasingly rewards fluency in both English and Mandarin. Whether the model transfers in Hong Kong, where most internationally minded families have historically defaulted to IB or British-curriculum schools, will be closely watched across the sector.