Founded
1953

By volunteer parents as the Shuwaikh School — nine pupils

Curriculum
British

Foundation Stage + National Curriculum for England

Ages
3–16

Historically 3–13; Upper School growing to Year 11

Location
Salmiya

Mousaed Al-Azmi Street, Block 12

Structure
Not-for-profit

Kuwait’s only one; owned by the Al-Bahar family

Roll
~710

53 nationalities, 70 teaching staff

The short version

The short version

The English School, Kuwait (TES) is a not-for-profit British-curriculum school in Salmiya teaching the Foundation Stage and National Curriculum for England to about 710 pupils of 53 nationalities.

It was founded in 1953 by a group of volunteer parents in expatriate housing in North Kuwait — nine children, a five-parent management team, and an agreement from day one that the school would be non-profit making. The founding fee was 150 rupees.↗↗

For an expat family, the practical summary is this: TES is the heritage British option — small, not-for-profit, with unusually transparent published fees, and a community identity built over seventy years.

The structural fact to plan around is range: TES has historically run to age 13, and only launched an Upper School in 2025, taking its first Year 9 class with Years 10 and 11 to follow.

If you need an established all-through pathway to IGCSE and beyond today, that growth story is the thing to interrogate.

What the school is

Not-for-profit, family-owned, and proud of both

TES describes itself as the only not-for-profit school in Kuwait and the oldest British school in the Middle East.

The school was renamed from the Shuwaikh School in 1970 at the request of the Ministry of Education’s new Private Schools sector, closed for a year during the 1990–91 invasion, and reopened in 1991 with just under 30 pupils before moving to its present Salmiya site in 1996.↗↗

Ownership here is unusual and worth understanding precisely. TES is not-for-profit, but it is also family-owned: the Al-Bahar family have been the school’s owners and patrons for decades, with long-time owner Mohamed Abdulrahman Al-Bahar awarded an OBE in 2003 for services to education and the British community, and Mr Emad Al-Bahar the owner today.

A governing committee and leadership team run the school day to day. In practice the model blends the stability of a not-for-profit with the continuity of a founding family — a different answer to the governance question than either a corporate chain or a parent-elected board.↗

Externally, the school was inspected by the UK Independent Schools Inspectorate in May 2022, holds BSO accreditation, and is a member of IAPS, BSME and COBIS.

In 2022 it was named a GL International Centre of Excellence — one of six schools globally at the time — and it opened a new Science and Technology building in September 2024.↗↗

The Upper School question

A 70-year-old prep school grows up

For most of its life TES educated children from age 3 to 13, after which families moved children on to other schools in Kuwait, the UK or elsewhere. In 2025 the school launched an Upper School, welcoming its first Year 9 class with plans to grow into Years 10 and 11 within two academic years.

The published fee schedule now prices through Year 10.↗↗

For parents this is the central due-diligence question. A new secondary phase means new staff, new systems and — eventually — first IGCSE cohorts whose results will not exist for years.

Ask how the Upper School is staffed, what the intended terminal qualification is, what the projected cohort sizes are, and what the school’s honest advice is for a child who would be in its first exam years.

The school’s seventy-year record says a great deal about its primary-phase quality; it says little yet about its secondary outcomes.

Admissions and cost

Published fees — a rarity in this market

TES publishes a full fee schedule on its website — refreshingly transparent for Kuwait, where the best-known British school publishes nothing.

The published annual fees are KWD 1,741 for Kindergarten, KWD 2,735 for Reception to Year 2, KWD 3,135 for Years 3–6 and KWD 3,435 for Years 7–10, payable in three instalments due 1 September, 1 December and 1 April.

A KWD 100 annual registration fee secures a place for the following year and is credited against the next year’s invoice.↗

Two budgeting notes. First, the published page does not carry an academic-year label, so confirm the schedule applies to your entry year before you rely on it.

Second, private-school fee rises in Kuwait are capped at 3% a year without Ministry of Education permission, which makes TES’s costs more predictable than in less regulated markets. Uniform, transport and activities are separate lines — ask for those figures too.↗↗

Admissions follow Kuwait norms: application form, previous school reports, birth certificate, passport, visa stamp and Civil ID copies, vaccination proof, and an admissions assessment in English and maths. Waiting lists at popular schools can be long, so apply ahead of arrival where possible.↗

The family experience

Community, facilities and the daily reality

The campus is in Salmiya’s Block 12, within the coastal belt where most expat families live and where several other international schools sit. Facilities are substantial for a school of 710: a 600-plus-seat Performing Arts Centre, a six-lane 25-metre swimming pool, three ICT labs, three science labs and the new STEAM building.

The school has been a BYOD iPad school since 2016, which it credits for a smooth pivot to online learning during the pandemic.↗↗

The community claim is the school’s own, but it is consistent across sources: parents founded the school, a Parents Association has run formally since 1973, and the published parent testimonials emphasise warmth and happiness.

The honest counterweight is scale — a 710-pupil school feels very different from Kuwait’s 3,000-plus-pupil campuses, and whether that reads as intimacy or limitation depends on your child.

Our readConfidence: Medium

The not-for-profit heritage option — with a secondary phase still being born

The public record on TES is unusually coherent: a 1953 parent founding, an unbroken not-for-profit structure, a named owning family with a seventy-year stake, ISI inspection, the main British-schools memberships, and — rarest of all in Kuwait — a published fee schedule.

Our confidence is Medium rather than High because this edition is document-based, and because the school is mid-transformation: the Upper School changes what TES is, and the documents cannot yet tell us how well it is going.

The families it suits are those wanting a small, warm, British primary-phase school with transparent costs and a genuine community identity — and who either plan to move on at 13 anyway, or are willing to grow with the new Upper School on faith in the school’s track record.

Families needing a proven IGCSE pathway today should weigh established all-through alternatives and ask TES the hard secondary questions directly. On transparency alone, TES sets the standard other Kuwait schools could follow.

Take these to the school

Questions that move beyond the tour script

The Upper School

  1. How is the new Upper School staffed, and what qualifications will the first cohorts work toward?
  2. What are projected Year 9–11 cohort sizes, and when will the first examined cohort graduate?
  3. For a child joining now, what is the school’s honest advice on staying through Year 11 versus moving on?

Cost and logistics

  1. Which academic year does the published fee schedule apply to, and what are the separate costs for uniform, transport and activities?
  2. How do the three instalment dates work for a family joining mid-year?
  3. What have annual fee increases run in recent years, given the Ministry of Education’s 3% cap?

Admissions and fit

  1. What does the admissions assessment involve for our child’s year group, and are there waiting lists?
  2. How does the school support children joining mid-year from non-British curricula?
  3. What learning-support and English-as-an-additional-language provision exists, and how is it staffed?

Continue your research

Choose your next step

Sources and further research

Where to verify and keep reading

We favor direct links to the exact page or document a family may need next. Access dates matter because admissions, tuition, leadership, and programs change.