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“Education is Britain’s greatest export - bar none.”

Dukes Education founder and chair Aatif Hassan, sitting in the firm’s spacious offices just 473 steps from Buckingham Palace (“I’ve counted,” he adds), knows this is a big claim.

“I say that in the context of my deep love for the royal family - I’m on the board of two charities for His Majesty the King and Her Majesty the Queen - but I do believe education is the country’s greatest export.”

This belief is one reason Hassan has driven Dukes through a rapid international expansion, going from zero international schools in 2022 to 25 today across Europe, with locations including Ireland, Croatia, Romania and Greece - and plans to grow.

“Today we’ve got four schools in Portugal. I could see that number at least doubling, even in just the next 12 months. We have seven schools in Spain. Again, I’d like to double that number.”

Middle East expansion

Perhaps even more notably, he also confirms to ����Vlog that Middle East expansion is on the cards, specifically in the United Arab Emirates.

“The population growth and the need for schools…it’s the obvious next place for us to go and set up a new regional hub, so plans are afoot,” he says.

Hassan also suggested other nations could follow, explaining it would make sense to “apply the same logic as we’ve done in Europe” of having schools across a region, rather than focusing solely on one area.

It’s this mindset that has made Dukes one of the fastest-growing international school groups, and while Hassan says he does not want to put a target on this - likening that to a “straitjacket” - there is no doubt it is on a strong growth trajectory.

“The infrastructure we have could support double the number of schools we have today, quite easily,” he adds.

Success laced with tragedy and failure

The success of the group, and Hassan’s bullish attitude, is perhaps unsurprising for someone who, after gaining a first-class degree in mathematics and economics, went on to have a stellar career in the City, including stints at PwC, Close Brothers Group and August Equity.

He also has a British Army commission from time in the Territorial Army, much of which was spent with the Army Cadets, a role that has taken in everything from mentoring children in Feltham Young Offender Institution to looking after Prince William at Eton College.

Yet all of this success was by no means guaranteed, with Hassan’s life laced with “tragedy and failure”, including the death of his mother when he was 6 from a “medical mistake” that caused a huge scar on his childhood.

“I remember things between four- and six-years-old [but] I have no memory between the ages of 6 and 8 at all,” he says. “I’ve had therapy. I’ve had a lot of work done, and there’s been a diagnosis of PTSD there.”

Tragedy also struck Hassan as an adult when his eldest son passed away: “It’s why I feel very passionate about supporting childhood bereavement services, such as the Ruth Strauss Foundation,” he adds.

The failure he refers to, meanwhile, can be seen by his own educational experience: he failed the 11-plus examination, ended up in a “classic comprehensive school” that he was asked to leave at age 13 due to bad behaviour.

This was perhaps the sliding doors moment in his life, though. “If you go back to my state school, a third of that class have served time in prison,” he says.

Seeing light after a dark moment

Hassan, instead, ended up at St James Independent School for boys, a move he admits was a gamble for his father, who used what “small amount of money he had” to send him to the school, feeling it would be better suited to his educational abilities.

It was a savvy investment as Hassan went on to gain a set of GCSEs and A levels that enabled him to go to Loughborough University and then into the City, and his success thereafter.

Yet it took another dark life event to set him on the path to education, after he was involved in a triple fatality car accident where four cars collided in West London, and only he survived.

“I was taken into hospital, regained consciousness and had to have two very minor operations. After that, I decided I was going to quit everything I was doing, from sport and military to the workplace,” he recalls.

“We sold everything and did this barking mad thing, as it was perceived at the time, of deciding to go and buy a school that was seen as a failing special needs school…and I just totally fell in love with it,” says Hassan.

This was 2013, and he set up a group called Cavendish Education for the school to operate in. The plan was for him to retrain as a teacher and run sports clubs in the afternoon.

The teacher training never quite happened, but Hassan’s passion for sport - he played Rugby Sevens for the England Army U19 team - saw him set up and coach a football team at the school.

“I formed the first ever football team for these autistic children, and everyone said to me, ‘These children can’t play football.’”

Hassan is clearly someone who likes to prove people wrong - but admits it did not go well at first: “In our first proper game, we lost 11-0. The teachers were up in arms, and the parents were saying, ‘You’re meant to be instilling confidence, and it’s all gone wrong.’”

Yet there was no other choice but to “persevere”, he says - and in the penultimate game of the season, they drew 2-2, followed by winning the final game 4-1.

“These children, who’d been written off from society, came together, the whole of the community was behind them, and it gave them so much confidence,” he explains.

Learning the ropes at this school gave Hassan the confidence to buy another special school, this time it was Bredon School in Tewkesbury, where he again used sport to inspire pupils - this time going even more against the status quo by introducing shooting.

“We got involved with the army, brought in some of the best shots in the country to help coach these kids, who were often dyspraxic and had difficulty coordinating, and in 2016, we hosted the national championships, and we won,” he says.

“These kids who were dyslexic, dyspraxic, who had fallen out of the system, some with education, health and care plans, had lost confidence in their lives...suddenly they were UK champions. They were the best of the best.”

Bredon School in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire

He said this was a seminal moment: “There was a recognition that they could perform - and the next year [2017-18], A-level results for an entire cohort of students with special educational needs went to 41 per cent A* and A, which was 100th in the national league tables, ahead of lots of mainstream schools.”

Meanwhile, in the value-added post-16 league table, the school - an outcome Hassan says solidified a large part of the educational ethos the 22 Cavendish Education schools now have.

“We realised there was a single formula to the whole thing - it was essentially about instilling children with bags of confidence and creating a safe environment,” he says.

Linked to this is the group’s rejection of the term “special education needs and disabilities” (SEND) - with Hassan saying they prefer using “unique learning profile”.

He adds: “We try not to use SEND, I think it’s a derogatory word to unfortunately label children. These are children who are blessed with unique learning profiles.”

Hassan here, too, has a personal connection, referring often to his own dyslexia and ADHD, which he says should be seen as “superpowers”.

Bringing in expert educators

As Cavendish was growing, Dukes was also taking flight, having been formed in 2015 with the intent of doing similar work to Cavendish but with mainstream private schools. Dukes now has 22 schools in London, three in Cambridge, two in Kent and one in Cardiff - making it the biggest operator of private schools in the UK.

Despite this growth, Hassan still tries to make time to engage with pupils by taking a lesson every Friday.

“I’ve done everything from mathematics at Hampton Court House to politics at Broomwood, talks on neurodiversity to philosophy lessons to business studies, economics [and] climbing,” he explains.

Hassan says he finds it valuable to stay close to what children are thinking and get a “real sense of what your purpose is and staying connected to that core”. He adds: “I love being in the classroom. I always learn something.”

Hassan is under no illusions that he is an educator, though, admitting he often gets “impostor syndrome” running an education group.

This is why, as Dukes grew, it went on a hiring spree of high-profile names. Professor Mark Bailey, former head of St Paul’s School, David Goodhew, formerly head of Latymer, Libby Nicholas, a former senior leader at the Girls’ Day School Trust and UK CEO Tim Fish all joined, which Hassan says was vital to ensure it had the “deep education foundation” needed to succeed.

He adds: “At the centre of the organisation is a focus on how we’re going to ensure teachers become the best version of themselves, and [how we can] train them and collaborate and support and engage with them [to do that].”

One novel way the group does this is by getting all 5,500 UK staff together at a single location - this year at Wembley Stadium, and with similar plans for international schools at its Madrid HQ in the future - to create a sense of community within Dukes.

It also offers some 400 professional development opportunities to all staff each year, with its London HQ hosting regular CPD sessions for all staff, from teachers to professional services leaders.

Waiting for the right moment to go abroad

With this all in place, it was in 2022 that he felt it was the right time to make the move into the international space - something he admits he held back on for some time.

“We’d seen our peers successfully go overseas, but I wanted to go when I had something to offer; I was not in a hurry,” he says.

One key issue was Brexit and a nervousness over “how British education would be perceived in the world”.

He says, though, that the first school it acquired in Portugal welcomed the team “with open arms”.

From there, the group never looked back with acquisitions coming thick and fast - with the most recent deal for Thames British School in Warsaw, Poland, announced in August.

Thames British School in Warsaw, Poland

What’s more, he says the move overseas has also impacted the group in other ways, most notably by learning lessons from other systems and what they do best.

“If you look at classroom design, I’d say the Portuguese are many years ahead of us, from the structure of the room and the tables and chairs to their innovations around technology,” he says.

“If you go to Ireland, there is a relentless focus on excellence in teaching quality and recording lessons, to rigour around the assessment of teachers that is perhaps unrivalled in the world.”

These insights are now being used to evolve Dukes’ thinking in numerous areas, and that serves as a neat dovetail to his view on the British education system.

“Every country we’ve gone to, we’ve learned so much that we’ve brought to our UK organisation,” he says.

“So, while I believe the globe has benefited from British education, we’re now benefiting from internationalism, too, and that’s really special.”

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