Last term, my son came home from his school in Nairobi talking about Corbettmaths, a free British library of math videos, worksheets, and practice questions his teacher had introduced in class. He is in Year 8 and his school follows the Cambridge curriculum, one of the British-based international programs used by schools around the world. What struck me was how well the resource fit. The topics matched what my son had been learning. The pace matched what he is used to. The practice questions looked like the ones he would eventually answer in an exam.
That should be ordinary. For many children learning outside American and British school systems, it is not. I spend a lot of time in learning engineering and education technology circles that talk constantly about artificial intelligence and the future of learning. Big panels, ambitious roadmaps, global conversations. But that week, the useful thing in my house was a set of worksheets created by a teacher who understood exactly the syllabus my son was studying.
Many children in his position do not get that. They use tools built around another curriculum, another assessment system, or another classroom infrastructure.
The Cost Of Misalignment
It is worth being specific about what that costs a student. A child reviews a topic thoroughly and then finds it is not assessed on her exam board, because the practice app was built around a different set of standards. A teacher spends a free period rewriting an American worksheet so it matches what her students will be tested on, time she could have spent with the students. A struggling reader gets recommended a text calibrated to a reading framework his school does not use. None of this is dramatic. It is just steady, quiet friction, and it accumulates across a school year.
The children working against that friction are not a small group, and their numbers are growing fast.
Around 7.7 million students now attend international schools worldwide, taught by roughly 730,000 staff across more than 15,000 schools, according to ISC Research, which tracks the sector. International schools have grown for six straight years – 58 percent of these schools are in Asia; 15 percent in the Americas; and 12 percent in Africa. This distribution tilts toward the countries that are rarely mentioned in education technology conversations.
The growth is concentrated in those same places. More than 5,000 schools now teach Cambridge programs, and Africa is home to more Cambridge schools than any other region in the world. The International Baccalaureate, a Swiss based program used in schools globally, grew 44 percent in India over five years, expanding from 192 schools in 2020 to 276 in 2025, much of that reaching smaller cities rather than the major metros. Advanced Placement, the American college level program, grew 21 percent globally over the same period.
There are millions of children in international schools, educational environments their families chose deliberately, learning on software that was mostly designed for somebody else’s classroom, often in the United States or England.
There are millions of children in international schools, educational environments their families chose deliberately, learning on software that was mostly designed for somebody else's classroom, often in the United States or England.
An Opportunity To Design Differently
The reason is not mystery or malice. It is sequencing. For many companies, product roadmaps start with the standards closest to their founders, investors, and first customers, often American Common Core or the English national curriculum. Alignment to other systems gets added later, if it gets added at all. Pricing assumes American household incomes or public school district budgets. Distribution is built around American district purchasing cycles and English local authority frameworks, rather than the international school groups that actually run these schools.
Founders pitching this market are often told international schools are too fragmented to sell to. That is not quite true. International education organizations like GEMS Education, Nord Anglia and Cognita each operate dozens to hundreds of campuses across multiple continents, and they often make central or regional purchasing decisions that can scale a product across many schools at once.
Some ed tech companies have figured this out, and their results are worth paying attention to, mostly because of their impact on students and what it suggests is possible when a curriculum’s context is treated as a core design priority.
Designing for the Global Classroom
CENTURY Tech, a British company, works with more than 100 international schools worldwide, including a growing number of International Baccalaureate schools across the Middle East and Pakistan. According to a case study published by CENTURY Tech, GEMS Wellington Academy in Dubai reported that the share of students performing above curriculum standards rose 21 percent in English, 20 percent in math and 22 percent in science after adopting the platform. In Bermuda, Chatmore British International School used it to lift exam results and, according to staff there, student confidence alongside them. These are reported case study outcomes rather than independent evaluations, but they illustrate the kind of curriculum-specific implementation the broader market often lacks.
Sparx Learning, best known for its math platform in English secondary schools, also works with international school groups and reaches well over 2 million students a year. Elsewhere, Enko Education runs international schools across 10 sub Saharan African countries, and SchoolTry, built in Nigeria, is expanding across Africa and Europe.
What these examples share is not a clever technology. It is a decision made early, to treat the curriculum a student is actually studying as a design requirement rather than a localization problem to solve later.
Doing that well is not complicated, but it does have to happen at the start. Map content to the assessment criteria students will genuinely face, because those criteria shape what a child spends her year learning. Build for the devices and bandwidth these schools have, not the ones a Silicon Valley pilot classroom has. Price for what these families and school groups actually pay. Treat the exam boards as partners rather than an integration to bolt on in year three. And design reporting and analytics around the curricula and qualifications these schools actually use, not just a generic dashboard.
Map content to the assessment criteria students will genuinely face, because those criteria shape what a child spends her year learning. Build for the devices and bandwidth these schools have, not the ones a Silicon Valley pilot classroom has. Price for what these families and school groups actually pay.
An Untapped Market Hiding In Plain Sight
There is a commercial case here too, and it is a strong one. International school fees total close to $69 billion a year. The sector keeps expanding, and the school groups buying software have real budgets and centralized purchasing. Nearly 60 percent of schools opened between 2024 and 2026 launched with hybrid curricula, which means demand for tools that can handle more than one system is rising. For founders and product teams, the signal is straightforward. International schools are not a niche to localize for later. They are a core market to design for from day one.
But the money is the consequence, not the reason. Companies that build carefully for these students will do well, and they should. The point is that the students are already there, in classrooms across Nairobi and Mumbai and Jakarta and Amman, learning every day on tools that were built with a different classroom in mind. Someone else’s curriculum, someone else’s exam board, someone else’s classroom infrastructure.
There is a commercial case here too, and it is a strong one. International school fees total close to $69 billion a year. The sector keeps expanding, and the school groups buying software have real budgets and centralized purchasing.
My son got lucky last term. A teacher somewhere in England built something that happened to fit a boy studying in Kenya, and it worked. That should not be luck. There are millions of children in schools like his, and the education technology industry has both the capability and the commercial incentive to build for them properly. What it has mostly lacked is the decision to try, to start with their curricula, their assessments, and their classrooms, instead of treating those as an afterthought.
