In order to provide Indian expatriates working throughout Asia with a place to send their children without compromising the curriculum they were accustomed to back home, a small school with 48 students opened on Mount Sophia in Singapore in 2002. At that time, nobody was probably considering Tokyo, Abu Dhabi, or Ho Chi Minh City. And yet, here we are.
With 64 campuses and approximately 45,000 students enrolled, Global Indian International School, or GIIS as most people refer to it, currently operates in 11 countries. It’s the kind of growth trajectory that is genuinely unexpected up close and appears inevitable in retrospect. It is difficult to make the connection between the original school of four dozen students and the 10-acre SMART Campus in Punggol, Singapore, which now has over forty skill-based studios, indoor sports facilities, and the kind of digitally enhanced classrooms that belong in an architecture magazine.
Over the course of more than 20 years, GIIS created something that closes a gap that most international school systems have never truly addressed. The conventional international school model—IB here, Cambridge there, and everything calibrated for families rotating through postings in Geneva or Hong Kong—was created for Western expatriates. Indian professionals who relocated overseas encountered a distinct issue. It wasn’t always feasible to switch to a strictly Western framework because their children were frequently mid-stream in CBSE, the Indian curriculum, especially for families who intended to eventually return home. In essence, GIIS stated that you shouldn’t have to make a decision.
The breadth of the curriculum offered at its Singapore campuses alone is nearly overwhelming: Global Montessori Plus for the youngest students, IB Primary Years Programme, Cambridge IGCSE, IB Diploma, CBSE, and a bilingual English-Mandarin track. This breadth may lead to additional challenges; managing six different curricula under one roof is not an easy operational task, and maintaining uniform academic standards across all of them calls for true institutional discipline. However, the school’s IBDP average of 36.3 points, with nine students scoring 44 out of 45, is comfortably above global averages in 2024, suggesting that something is working.
Observing GIIS’s growth gives the impression that the school had a better understanding of diaspora psychology than the majority of educators. Indian families living overseas don’t always want to fully integrate into the local educational system or feel cut off from it. They want choices, and they want those choices to feel cohesive rather than haphazard. Among all CBSE-affiliated schools operating outside of India, GIIS Tokyo notably placed in the top 10. This distinction is significant to parents who still evaluate their children’s development against a system located 5,000 miles away.
On paper, the holistic education framework GIIS refers to as 9GEMS reads like something every school claims to offer, with academics at its core and sports, the arts, innovation, entrepreneurship, community development, and a few other pillars surrounding it. Execution plays a major role in whether or not it translates into practice. The school’s student happiness index surveys are a unique feature, and you don’t often see organizations promote them with such prominence. It’s either a very astute marketing move or a sincere dedication to the welfare of students. Most likely both.
The scholarship program, which covers everything from leadership and service to academic merit, at the very least shows that access is important. Although fees at different campuses vary greatly—the Singapore campus alone ranges from about $5,000 to over $10,000 annually—the scholarship structure indicates that the school isn’t only targeting affluent families, even though that is its main target market.
More than anything, GIIS is a significant institutional wager that global education and Indian education are complementary. By viewing Indian families living overseas as a constituency worth developing for rather than an afterthought, the network has expanded. It is still genuinely unclear if that model will continue to scale smoothly across 11 countries, each of which has its own regulatory framework, cultural norms, and competitive landscape. However, the current trajectory makes it difficult to rule out.
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