China has more international schools than any other country. That fact is quoted a great deal and understood rather less. The market has stopped growing, it is divided into segments that cannot stand in for one another, and the group of families each segment relies on is getting smaller. This briefing sets out what that means for schools, operators, boards, and investors between now and 2030.
China spent most of the last decade as the international-school industry's growth story. It is not that any longer. The sector is saturated and has begun to consolidate, and the schools most exposed are the ones whose finances or positioning were built for the conditions of ten years ago. Demand has not collapsed. What has gone is the assumption that it will keep turning up on its own. The useful question for the rest of the decade is no longer how big the market is, but which schools are built to last through a stretch when size on its own counts for very little.
A large market that has stopped growing
By ISC Research's count, China has roughly 1,117 international schools, more than any other country, ahead of India (around 991) and the United Arab Emirates (about 898). Worldwide the sector comes to nearly 15,000 schools, some 7.5 million students and somewhere in the region of US$67 billion to US$69 billion in annual fees. China's own industry tracker, New School Insight, works from a tighter definition and counts 972 “authorized” schools, which between them enroll about 496,000 students at an average fee of roughly RMB 120,000. Whichever figure you take, the scale is genuine, and it is usually read as proof that the market is in good health. That reading is wrong. ISC's review of East Asia notes that growth in China stopped after the 2021 regulatory changes, that a number of international and private schools closed, and that others put planned openings on hold. A big installed base is not the same thing as a growing one.
The stall is easier to see with the growth rates side by side. Between 2020 and 2025 the number of international schools worldwide rose by about 8 percent and enrollment by about 13 percent. East Asia, which holds close to 60 percent of the world's international schools and around US$40 billion of the fee income, grew just 4 percent over the same period. China's enrollment rose roughly 3 percent. Japan's rose 11 percent; Hong Kong (SAR) actually slipped, by about half a percent. Against the parts of the sector still moving quickly, Vietnam up 24 percent and Brazil up 32 percent, China looks less like a growth market and more like a mature one. Openings and closures tell the same story. Coverage of New School Insight's 2024 report has the domestic build-out slowing to a crawl, with well-known names among the recent casualties. Nord Anglia closed its Fangshan campus in Beijing in 2024, and schools in Shenzhen and Chengdu have gone the same way.
Consolidation is the other visible response, and for now it is the stronger operators leading it. In May 2026 Dulwich College International announced that its two Shanghai campuses, in Pudong and Puxi, would run as one college across two sites. The school presented the move, reasonably, as an academic and community decision. In commercial terms it is also a tidying-up of resources by a well-run group protecting itself for the long haul. When the best-known names in a market start combining operations rather than opening new ones, that tells you something about the conditions.
The market is really two markets
Treating “demand” as a single thing is where a lot of the analysis goes wrong, because Chinese law splits the market according to who a school is allowed to teach. Schools for the children of foreign personnel, the traditional expatriate international schools, cannot enroll Chinese nationals at all; every student has to hold a foreign passport. Chinese-owned private and bilingual schools can take local children, which is where most of the domestic appetite for an international-style education actually sits, but they carry a heavier regulatory load, including the 2021 rules on what such schools may call themselves and the ban on foreign textbooks during the nine years of compulsory schooling. New School Insight's own breakdown shows how uneven the two sides are. Of its 972 schools, only 157 are foreign-passport schools. The other 815, made up of 555 private international schools and 260 public international divisions, depend wholly or partly on the domestic families that the expatriate schools are not permitted to touch. What modest growth the sector has managed has come almost entirely from that domestic side, from returning Chinese families and from other Asian and African enrollments taking seats that departing Western families left behind.
A shrinking pool of foreign families
For the 157 foreign-passport schools, the constraint is close to simple arithmetic: the number of foreigners in China has been falling for years. Shanghai's foreign population was around 208,000 in 2010 and 163,000 by the 2020 census; by 2023 and 2024 various local counts put it between roughly 72,000 and 92,000, somewhere close to half its peak. Beijing's long-term foreign workforce dropped from about 37,000 to 22,000 across the same decade. The picture holds up nationality by nationality. Between the 2010 and 2020 censuses the number of French nationals in China fell by about 40 percent and the number of Americans by roughly a quarter, and UN figures record more than 310,000 foreigners leaving the country in 2022 alone. A school barred by law from enrolling Chinese children is competing for a far smaller number of families than it was a decade ago, and no amount of admissions work brings those families back.
The families who are still there are also, on average, less likely to have school-age children. The old multi-year posting that brought a whole family to China and filled a good part of an expatriate school has been giving way to shorter assignments, commuter and project arrangements, and more local hiring into senior roles, with a lot of Western technical staff replaced by people from elsewhere in the world. All of those patterns tend to bring fewer children than the family packages did. So the foreign-passport pool is not just smaller these days, it is older too, and the slice of it these schools actually recruit from is thinning fastest of all.
The exception: national and community schools
Not every foreign-passport school feels this to the same degree. The national and community schools, meaning the French, German and Japanese programs and others like them, sit in the same legal category but behave quite differently. They are the obvious choice for their own community, they keep a child on the same national curriculum they would follow at home, and most are run as nonprofits, often with backing from the home government or embassy rather than as businesses chasing fee income. So even as the underlying national populations shrink, they tend to hold their numbers, partly by keeping most of their own community and partly by opening up to other families who want that language or that system. One well-known Shanghai school of this kind has around 1,550 students from some 60 nationalities, which is not what a struggling school looks like. The resilience is built into how they are set up, and it is hard for a commercial operator to reproduce.
For a commercial operator the awkward implication is that the size of its potential intake is decided a long way from its own front desk, in the mobility budgets of large employers and the relocation policies behind them. How many family postings a multinational still pays for, how long those postings run, and whether the package still covers school fees will do more to shape an expatriate school's future roll than anything its admissions team does. The corporate mobility departments, the relocation and destination-services firms, and the companies weighing up whether to send an expatriate at all or simply hire locally sit upstream of the entire segment, and they rarely feature in a school's own planning. A generalist international school chasing a shrinking, ageing foreign-passport pool, with neither the loyal community of a national school nor the domestic access of a bilingual one, is in the most exposed position of the lot.
The domestic side is under pressure too
The other pool, the domestic families the bilingual and private schools rely on, is shrinking as well, more slowly and for its own reasons. The National Bureau of Statistics reported a further fall in China's population in 2025. A Ministry of Education explainer carried by People's Daily in March 2026 described the school-age population moving in waves, with different age groups peaking in 2026, 2029 and 2032. None of that adds up to a single tidy national forecast, and any school that treats it as one will plan badly. What it does rule out is the comfortable idea that the demand of a few years ago will simply return. It won't, and a plan quietly built on the assumption that it will is already behind.
Fees, and the wider comparison
There is also a comparison that more China schools will have to answer to before 2030, because for a mobile family the choice is no longer only between schools in the same city. Well-known premium brands run schools across the region, Thailand among the most visible, and they can offer a familiar name at a very different price. The published fees make the gap concrete. Harrow Shanghai's 2026/27 schedule sets annual tuition somewhere between about RMB 275,200 and RMB 399,000 depending on the year group. Harrow Bangkok's runs from about THB 571,100 to THB 1,063,000 before extras. These are not like-for-like offers, and any honest comparison has to say so, since the families, the visa and residency positions and the day-to-day reality of living in each place all differ. But for a family already thinking about boarding or a move, the same trusted name now turns up in two places at very different prices, and for some of them that is enough to tip the decision. It is not only a Shanghai and Beijing question either. Wellington College International's fees in Tianjin show that serious premium pricing reaches well beyond the two most visible cities. Wherever the school sits, it is asking a family for a large, multi-year act of trust, and in a softer market the cost of a vague or generic pitch is a good deal higher than it was when a strong brand and a new building did most of the work.
What the admissions numbers are saying
This is why the admissions numbers deserve a closer read than they usually get. A school can still be generating inquiries, running campus tours and drawing real interest, and yet be closing fewer of those families than it did a year or two ago. When that happens, the problem is usually not the admissions team. It is trust, or positioning, or a school that cannot explain in plain language why it is worth the money. A generic promise, a fuzzy identity or a fee that is hard to justify all get found out quickly once families have genuine choice. One of the quieter features of a crowded market is that a school can be busy with inquiries and still not fill its seats.
Staffing cuts and the merging of functions are worth reading in the same light. Centralizing back-office roles, combining leadership, putting senior year groups together, running leaner: managers will describe all of this as sensible optimization, and sometimes it genuinely is. But it is also a sign that there is very little slack left. Many of these schools were set up on the assumption of continued growth and are now operating in a market that has stopped supplying it. By 2030 the gap between schools designed to expand and schools designed to sit out a downturn will be one of the more telling divides in the sector.
“Premium” is not one thing
Premium is where the split shows most clearly, because premium covers very different schools. One with a long record, real results, settled governance and a community that would miss it if it closed can hold its position. A weaker imitator, leaning on an imported name, prestige cues and promises it cannot back up, is far more exposed, and buyers have grown less forgiving. Parents paying premium fees are not really buying a badge. They are buying confidence, continuity, results and, above all, a decision they will not have to lie awake over. A school that cannot show those things tends to find its high price working against it, turning from a selling point into something it has to defend at every inquiry.
The two city tiers will not feel the squeeze the same way. Tier 1 cities hold the deepest premium and expatriate demand, but they are also the most crowded and most competitive school markets in the country, so that demand comes with the toughest field to beat. Tier 2 cities still have room for a good operator, but they are not automatically the softer option just because they get less attention. Often they mean thinner premium demand, more price-sensitive local families and a smaller group willing to commit to years of international schooling. The national picture is neither a collapse nor an open field. It is patchy, with the strain and the resilience both spread unevenly across it.
Who comes through
That leaves the only question that counts now, and it is about survival rather than growth: which schools are strong enough to hold their ground to 2030? It won't be the ones shouting loudest in their marketing, and it won't automatically be the ones with the newest campus or the most impressive imported name over the door. The schools most likely to come through are the less glamorous ones: well-led, clear about what they teach and why, able to prove their results, priced in a way they can defend, trusted by the parents they already have, and run tightly enough to take a demographic or economic knock without falling over. In a harder market that kind of steadiness stops looking dull and starts looking like the main advantage a school has.
For operators, boards and investors the conclusion is uncomfortable, but it is better said plainly. China's international-school sector still counts. It is too big and too important, both strategically and educationally, to walk away from. But it should be treated as a selective market going through a hard sorting process, not as a growth machine that can be taken for granted. By 2030 it will almost certainly be leaner and more demanding than the market many operators walked into ten years earlier. The best schools may come through it stronger. The weakest may not come through at all. The one genuinely dangerous move left is to keep running the old growth-era playbook and call it a strategy.
How NovaEd can help
NovaEd tracks how international schools are positioned across markets and where demand is actually heading. If you want to see how a particular school or group stands against the picture set out here, or how it comes across to the families it is trying to reach, get in touch.
Sources
1. ISC Research, “East Asia's Stalling International Schools Market.” iscresearch.com/east-asia-stalling-international-schools-market
2. ISC Research, “The International Schools Market in 2025” and Global Market Overview 2025. iscresearch.com/the-international-schools-market-in-2025
3. ISC Research, “Education policy changes in China” (school naming rules, foreign-textbook ban). iscresearch.com/education-policy-changes-in-china
4. New School Insight (新学说), 2024 China International Schools Development Report, 10th VIS International Education Development Conference, November 2024. xinxueshuo.cn/article/22333.html
5. Study International, “The 4 types of international schools in China.” studyinternational.com/news/demand-for-western-ed-in-china-breeds-4-types-of-international-schools
6. South China Morning Post, “China's dwindling Western expat workforce” (Beijing and Shanghai figures). scmp.com/opinion/china-opinion/article/3290097
7. 2020 China Census analysis of foreign-population change, by city and nationality. beijing-kids.com/blog/2021/05/13
8. Dulwich College International, “Introducing an Exciting New Chapter for Dulwich College Shanghai,” May 2026. dulwich.org/dulwich-life
9. Ministry of Education / People's Daily, school-age population explainer, March 2026. moe.gov.cn
10. National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2025 population update, January 2026. stats.gov.cn
11. Harrow Shanghai and Harrow Bangkok published tuition schedules, 2026/27. harrowshanghai.cn/admissions/fees; harrowschool.ac.th/admissions/tuition-fees
12. Wellington College International Tianjin published fees, 2026/27. tianjin.wellingtoncollege.cn/admissions/fees