Branksome Hall Asia

The short version

The short version

Branksome Hall Asia (BHA) is an IB World School for Junior Kindergarten Prep to Grade 12 in Jeju Global Education City, the government-built English-immersion school zone near Seogwipo.

Opened in October 2012, it is the only overseas sister school of Branksome Hall in Toronto — the Canadian girls’ school founded in 1903 — and the only one of the four GEC schools teaching the full IB continuum: PYP, MYP and Diploma Programme.↗↗

For an expat family, the practical summary is this: BHA is the GEC’s all-IB option, with a structure unlike anything else on the island — co-educational in the junior years, single-gender middle schools, and boarding that remains girls-only. Like every GEC school it is Korean-majority by design, and its 30 per cent International Merit Scholarships for non-Korean students tell you the school knows it. If you want the IB on Jeju, the real comparison is with NLCS Jeju, which reaches the IB by a British route.↗

What the school is

A Toronto sister school — and a diamond-model experiment

The Toronto relationship is documented rather than decorative. Branksome Hall Toronto signed a Cooperative Venture Agreement with the Korean government in 2009, runs a Grade 9 exchange programme for its students to study on Jeju, and counts BHA graduates as full members of the global Branksome Hall Alumnae Association. The school trades on “120 years of heritage” from the Canadian original. For the Toronto end of the relationship, see our profile of Branksome Hall.↗↗

The gender structure needs care, because it changed recently and old descriptions linger online. BHA was girls-only from Grade 6 up for its first decade — the only international girls’ school in Korea.

In August 2023 it launched the Highland Boys Middle School, a “school within a school” for boys in Grades 6-7, expanding one grade per year (boys were admitted up to Grade 9 in 2025-26).

The model the school describes is a diamond: integrated in the Junior School, separated through the Middle School years, and re-integrated in the Senior School. Boarding remains girls-only.↗↗↗

Accreditation and memberships cover the expected bases: IB authorisation across all three programmes, CIS and WASC accreditation, and TABS membership for the boarding programme. The school was named ISC Research’s International School of the Year in 2021.

Reported enrolment is roughly 1,200 students, about 16 per cent international and 25 per cent boarding, with an average class size of 20 — directory figures, so treat them as approximate.↗↗↗

Underneath it all sits the same legal carve-out as the other GEC schools: BHA may enrol Korean nationals without the mainland’s overseas-residence rule, which is why the student body is Korean-majority. Korean-passport students can graduate with up to three credentials — the IB Diploma, the BHA High School Diploma, and a Korean High School Graduation Diploma for those completing the required Korean language and Korean history credits from Grades 6-12. The mechanism comes from a dated school curriculum guide, so confirm current policy; the domestic-recognition principle itself is documented in the GEC framework covered by our Jeju city guide and the South Korea guide.↗↗

Academics in practice

IB results in the mid-30s — read the trend, not just the number

BHA publishes more outcome data than most GEC schools.

The IB Diploma average ran 36 in 2022, 36 in 2023 (against a world average of 29.95, with 100 per cent of successful candidates earning the bilingual diploma), and 35 in 2024 with a 100 per cent pass rate and 97 per cent bilingual diplomas across a 70-member class that also collected $4.1M in scholarship offers.

The school-communicated claim that around 93 per cent of graduates receive QS top-100 university offers appears in Korea Herald brand coverage.↗↗↗

The Class of 2026 — 72 graduates — received offers from 151 institutions across 12 countries, including the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Cornell, Cambridge, Imperial College London, Toronto, Melbourne, Hong Kong and Waseda. As with every school in this series: offers are not enrolments, and 151 institutions does not mean 151 destinations.

Ask for the matriculation list — where each graduate actually enrolled — for the last three years.↗

Two honest readings of the record. First, the average has drifted from 36 to 35 across the published years — still comfortably above world average, but a trend worth asking about, including cohort sizes, which the school does not publish.

Second, the near-universal bilingual diploma tells you something structural: this is a school of Korean-first-language students achieving in English, which is exactly the environment a foreign family is joining.

Admissions and cost

Admissions, 2026-27 fees and the scholarship lever

Admissions for 2026-27 are open, with a reported December 15 priority deadline and rolling review thereafter; a boarding-school directory puts acceptance around 50 per cent and names Adriana Mourgelas as Director of Admissions.

Historically, assessment combined the SSAT with an interview for Grades 6-10 and the school’s own readiness assessment for kindergarten to Grade 5 — confirm the current format for your child’s grade, including arrangements for applicants overseas.↗↗↗

The published 2026-27 tuition, verified against the school’s own fee page: JK Prep-Grade 5 KRW 21,762,000 + USD 14,148 per year; Grades 6-10 KRW 24,496,000 + USD 15,722; Grade 11 KRW 25,080,000 + USD 17,294; Grade 12 KRW 26,640,000 + USD 17,294.

Every invoice is split across both currencies, so the dollar portion floats with the exchange rate. First-time enrolment requires a non-refundable ₩3,000,000 deposit to hold the seat, deducted from the first tuition payment; transport, uniforms, meals — including boarding meals — trips and optional activities are all excluded.↗

Boarding for Grades 6-12 costs KRW 21,520,000 full-time, or KRW 17,192,000 for the weekdays-only five-day programme — the option built for families who keep their household in Seoul or elsewhere on the mainland.

A Korean parent blogger’s all-in calculation for a boarding student (tuition, dormitory, entrance fee, bus) totalled roughly ₩68.9M a year on dated figures — use it for scale, not for budgeting, and note that boarding meals bill on top of the boarding fee.↗↗

The lever foreign families should know about: BHA’s International Merit Scholarships cover 30 per cent of tuition and 30 per cent of boarding fees for non-Korean students new to the Middle and Senior School. In a market where the carve-out makes Korean applicants the default, this is a deliberate recruitment tool for international families — and it materially changes the value calculation against NLCS Jeju, where no equivalent discount is published.↗

Boarding life

Girls-only boarding, in families of ten

BHA houses its boarders in “families” of about ten students led by Teacher Dons and student mentors, with Heads of House living on campus.

The amenity list is strong even by GEC standards: modern bedrooms, communal lounges with kitchens, an Olympic-sized pool, an ice rink, a golf driving range, and supervised airport shuttles before and after school breaks.

Boarding is documented as girls-only even after the boys’ middle school opened — confirm whether that still holds for 2026-27 if you are applying for a son.↗↗

The weekday-boarding option is the structural detail that defines the school’s market: a girl can board Monday to Friday and be home in Seoul for the weekend, on an air route — Seoul Gimpo–Jeju — that was the world’s busiest in 2025 with 14.4 million scheduled seats at about 70 minutes gate to gate. The Friday exodus shapes campus weekends, so ask how many boarders stay through a typical weekend and what the Saturday programme looks like for them. Our boarding-school guide covers the questions to ask any residential school before committing.↗

The family experience

Location, community and the daily reality

The campus — 90,350 square metres at 234 Global edu-ro — sits in Daejeong-eup, a rural district on Jeju’s southwest inside a UNESCO World Heritage setting, 40 to 60 minutes from Jeju City.

The GEC is a school town, not a city: resident parents describe a quiet, safe, outdoors-rich life that requires a car and Korean-language errands, with Jeju City planned rather than spontaneous.

Relocation reporting notes many Korean families — particularly mothers — relocate to Jeju for the schooling rather than use boarding, and that the influx has pushed up local rents.↗↗

Parent sentiment, attributed and hedged: school-curated testimony describes boarding house life as “a close-knit family,” which is marketing until a current parent confirms it — ask the school to put you in touch with a boarding family at your child’s grade.

Korean parent communities treat GEC admissions as a competitive track with real preparation, and foreign families consistently flag the same two surprises: how Korean the peer culture is, and how rural the setting is. Both are fit questions, not flaws.

Take these to the school

Questions that move beyond the tour script