The UK private SEND school taking its expertise overseas

For well over 20 years, British independent schools have been setting up campuses overseas, and now a UK private special school, Moon Hall School, is looking to follow suit.

However, because the school in Reigate, Surrey, caters for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities, it will have to take a different approach to overseas expansion compared with its mainstream counterparts, says executive headteacher Michelle Catterson.

For a start, opening a sprawling new campus with a huge pupil roll would be unrealistic, given that a busy environment is not usually what children with SEND require to flourish.

“A lot of our children at Moon Hall in the UK have [in the past] struggled with that very large environment where they have felt very much overwhelmed,” says Catterson, who was named independent school headteacher of year at the 2026 Tes School Awards.

Furthermore, the international market for special schools is relatively unknown, making setting up a special school in another country a risky move.

A special school overseas

So the school has taken the smaller step of opening an assessment, tuition and therapy centre in Egypt, called the Moon Hall Cairo Learning Centre, which opened in September 2025.

The centre came into being after Catterson visited Saudi Arabia and Dubai with the UK Department of Trade and Industry in April 2024.

“It was really to talk about how we could bring our expertise to the region,” she explains.

Ultimately, though, it was in Egypt that the school found the right partner in funder New Era Education - which opened Uppingham Cairo in 2024 - and its founder and chairman, Dr Tamer Tammam.

This move made sense because there were no special schools in Egypt, explains Lucy Pelling, founding head of Moon Hall’s assessment centre in the country. While some children with SEND in Egypt are catered for in bases and units in mainstream schools, those with more acute issues often do not attend school at all.

Pelling estimates that when it comes to support for SEND, Egypt is around 20 years behind the UK.

That’s not to say that either Pelling or Catterson is dewy eyed about the support that pupils with SEND receive in the UK.

Catterson is clear that they are frequently failed by the system in the UK - many of the young people who arrive at Moon Hall in Reigate are “bruised” after bad experiences in the wrong environments with the wrong support, she says.

However, she adds that the UK has made strong progress regarding “how aware we are of SEN and how accepting we are of it, and how we try to help and support it”.

“In the Middle East there’s not that same understanding, so there are not the strategies and support there for families,” Catterson says.

But the Moon Hall centre is beginning to plug that gap.

Executive head Michelle Catterson hopes to open a full overseas sister school

The centre, which is staffed by a speech and language therapist, an occupational therapist and an SEND teacher, with a psychiatrist and educational psychologist hired as contractors, has worked with international private schools in the country including Uppingham - and also King’s School The Crown, El Alsson British and American International School and the American International School in Egypt.

It has delivered CPD on topics like dyslexia-friendly classroom strategies, speech and language strategies, and behaviour management.

Helping families to find support

However, the part of its work that has attracted the most interest is providing diagnostic assessments for families and then therapy and tutoring for children.

Pelling says previously Egyptian families were travelling to the UK and the US to get a diagnosis.

But now they can get the assessments they need closer to home, as well as expert advice on how to support their children - and word of mouth about these services has helped to drive ongoing interest, says Pelling, who got the centre up and running on secondment there from June 2025 until January 2026.

“If parents say, ‘My child went to Moon Hall and it’s excellent,’ things pick up and expand,” she says.

And already there are positive tales to tell. Pelling talks about a seven-year-old child who was unable to read when he arrived at the centre but who, within a couple of weeks, was reading “very simple books”.

Catterson, meanwhile, talks about a 14-year-old boy with ADHD and dyslexia whom the centre helped to avoid exclusion by providing him with one-to-one support, working with his parents “to help them understand their own child’s behaviour” and also working with the staff in his Cairo school.

Catteron says: “For us, it’s not about pointing the finger at the school and saying ‘you should have done this’ or ‘you should have done that’. We want to work in collaboration with the family and the school because that’s the absolute best thing for the child.”

Growing recognition

It’s because of this sort of work that Pelling says the vast majority of the centre’s clientele are Egyptian - around 85 per cent - with the rest being ex-pats.

This has meant sometimes quite difficult conversations with parents whose first language is not English.

Pelling’s solution was to introduce a highly detailed questionnaire for parents to fill out so she was well-informed about the issues they were facing from the get-go.

From this, she says, it is clear that when talking to parents about a diagnosis, the same approach applies as in the UK: they just want “sound and honest advice”.

“For some parents, an ADHD diagnosis or an autism diagnosis can be quite devastating news, so you have to deliver it in a really empathetic way and help them understand it’s not the end of the world, children can still succeed,” she says.

“Early identification and early support are the key because then you can put in place strategies that help the child.”

Pelling elaborates by saying that the centre also ensures that any work with parents includes the child’s school.

“Every time we worked with a child we also worked with the school because let’s say you are having speech and language or occupational therapy, those strategies won’t work unless it’s being consistently applied in the school environment and at home as well.”

Recruitment challenges and exciting opportunities

Doing this work requires qualified staff and Pelling says it has been difficult to fulfil the ambition to have the same quality of staff as in the UK.

“It’s super hard to recruit occupational therapists and speech and language therapists in the UK but when you are asking people to work internationally, that’s like Marmite - it either appeals or it doesn’t.”

Happily, working overseas did appeal to Imran Ghaznawi, an occupational therapist from Canada, who arrived in Cairo at the beginning of August to work at the Moon Hall centre.

Lucy Pelling (left) is founding head of Moon Hall School’s assessment, tuition and therapy centre in Egypt

He says he was attracted to the Moon Hall approach because it was in line with his own thinking in terms of seeing a child and their needs in the round.

“Moon Hall looks at the whole child and brings education, therapy and family support together to help the child succeed,” he explains.

Ghaznawi was also keen to bring his expertise to a part of the world where access to rehabilitation professionals is more limited - but in a setting where he knew he would be able “to practise ethically, use evidence-informed assessments, protect clinical information and remain accountable to their professional standards”.

“Egypt’s occupational therapy landscape is still developing, so those systems and expectations are not always as clearly established as they are in Canada or the UK,” he says.

But, Ghaznawi adds, Moon Hall Cairo “can create an environment where qualified therapists feel confident relocating, practising and contributing to this important work”.

And the centre is growing, with plans afoot to expand into another premises in Cairo and, from there, Catterson says the ambition remains to open a full special school in the country.

There is a gap in the market for a school with “less focus on exam results and more focus on personal development”, she says.

Strategically shrewd

Duncan Murphy, an education consultant and former school leader, agrees, saying “a market can be saturated with international schools and still be badly undersupplied in relevant or specialist provision”.

As such, Moon Hall starting with the Cairo centre was “strategically shrewd”, he says, allowing the school to build a network, a reputation and an understanding of demand before “taking on the far greater capital and operational commitment of opening a special school”.

His view is that such moves may become more common, as schools look for gaps in the market beyond the more generic offering, and “SEND is an obvious area where UK expertise has real international relevance”.

Despite the opportunity, Catterson acknowledges that because of the stigma attached to SEND by many in Egypt, any Moon Hall offshoot will have to be pitched carefully.

“Moving into a saturated market, a USP can be great because you’re different and you stand out, but it’s also making sure parents and children are comfortable with that difference,” she says.

This could explain why other UK special schools have yet to make the leap abroad - combined with the fact that there isn’t the same incentive for SEND schools to expand overseas given that intensively staffed small schools are more expensive to run and therefore any surpluses are likely to be “modest and minimal”, as Catterson puts it.

She is at one with this, though, saying Moon Hall went in with its “eyes open”, knowing any overseas operations would “never be a huge income generator”.

For her, it’s about helping children and their families - as well as raising the profile of Moon Hall Reigate, she says.

“We do lots of community outreach work but in order to make sure we are tapping into as many families as possible, we have to make sure our brand is as prominent as possible,” Catterson says.

To this point, she explains that any overseas campus that does open will be modelled on Moon Hall Reigate, which has a roll of just 200 pupils from Year 3 to Year 11 and high levels of staffing, with just nine pupils for every teacher on average across the school.

Catterson also expects to be hands-on and “very much involved with what’s happening” in terms of how any overseas school is staffed and run, and says that the UK school must see it as part of the community, not simply an overseas offshoot.

“The most important thing is making sure we have autonomy and that we are not just franchising out - that we are actually running the provision in Cairo with staff that we have recruited, following the same values we have here in the UK.”