The Shibuya Crossing in the centre of Japan’s capital city, Tokyo, will be familiar to many, with this chaotically busy pedestrian crossing a symbol for the city known around the world.

For Ian Clayton, principal of the British School in Tokyo (BST), this road junction is part of everyday life, given that it lies between his school’s two campuses, which are located 10km apart on a route through the busiest part of the city.

It is a journey he makes at least once a week to ensure that he treats both campuses equally, with two and a half days spent working at each - meaning every Wednesday his day begins at the primary campus and ends at the secondary campus.

Clayton explains: “We are two campuses but we’re one school, and the role of the principal is the personification of that, so staff and pupils and parents have to see me at both campuses, kind of acting as a bridge between them.”

The multi-campus conundrum

This is just one way BST addresses a reality faced by many international schools: ensuring consistency and coherence across multiple campuses - sometimes located just across the street from one another, but often miles apart in different areas of a city and in buildings that, outwardly at least, bear little or no resemblance to each other.

While this is a challenge, the consensus among international school leaders like Clayton is that ensuring consistency - from the décor to the teaching - is a battle worth winning so that pupils and parents feel part of a single school entity and staff at neither site feel overlooked or looked down on by the other. This isn’t always easy.

“There is always campus envy,” jokes Clayton.

However, one advantage at BST, he says, is that the primary and secondary campuses are so different they are “almost impossible to compare”.

The British School in Tokyo’s primary campus

The primary, which opened its doors in August 2023, is a new, state-of-the-art building; the secondary campus is located on a shared campus with two universities, Showa Women’s University and Temple University Japan, as well as a Japanese primary school and high school.

This means that BST’s secondary students can access university facilities like libraries, restaurants and cafes - something Clayton says has many benefits.

“It gives our kids the advantage of having a university atmosphere before they even get there, so they know what university students’ days are like, how they behave, the things they are expected to do.”

A sense of unity

However, while the secondary is a very different site, Clayton says it is still important that it feels part of BST and that no sense of superiority or inferiority is allowed to take hold on either campus.

The British School in Tokyo’s secondary campus

To this end, soon after the new primary campus opened there was a “fairly major” investment in the secondary campus, with a new drama studio and IT suite opened and new signage introduced to ensure that both sites “feel like a BST school”.

Meanwhile, decisions are made that are “whole-school, not one-school-based” and the two campuses are very deliberately brought together for key events such as its spring fair and a recent concert held to celebrate the school’s 35th anniversary.

Students also move between the campuses - for instance, secondary students sometimes travel to use the sports facilities at the primary campus. Teachers, though, are less likely to do so because of the distance.

However, multi-campus schools with sites closer together can use the movement of teaching staff between buildings to improve cohesion, says Deirdre Grimshaw.

Grimshaw is principal of the British Vietnamese International School Ho Chi Minh City but it was at her previous school, the British International School, located in the same city, that she experienced a multi-campus set-up.

The school had a junior campus and a secondary campus connected by a footbridge, as well as an early years campus a few hundred metres away from the junior campus.

The three schools could have operated as separate entities but the school leaders - of whom Grimshaw was one - “actively worked together to ensure we operated as one school”, with the staff encouraged to move between campuses and specialists like PE teachers, music teachers and modern languages teachers working across two - and sometimes all three - campuses.

Grimshaw experienced this herself when, after nine years as head of the junior campus, she swapped roles with the head of early years and infants.

The move was tough - she went from “knowing absolutely everything” about her setting to starting from scratch - but she discovered no stark differences in terms of “systems, policies, processes and procedures”.

Teaching together - and avoiding drift

However, Grimshaw stresses that the big reason for cooperation between campuses catering for different ages and stages is about ensuring continuity for pupils.

“Research says you can lose up to six months in terms of academic outcomes when students move between schools, and we can’t afford to do that,” she explains. “So everything has to be in place for a really successful transition.”

Staff at BIS met regularly - around half a dozen times a year - to look at the curriculum across primary and secondary and plan progression, she says.

“We started at the Year 6 to Year 7 point asking, ‘Where is the Year 6 student going and where are they coming from?’ so that the curriculum dovetailed seamlessly all the way through for our students.”

She adds: “The bottom line is, it’s what’s right for the kids. They needed to know they could start in foundation stage and go all the way to Year 13 and that the approach would be similar: the same values, the same culture, the same expectations.”

Grimshaw says what is key is ensuring a really “intentional” effort by staff at all sites to work together - rather than staff allowing themselves to feel like distinct entities.

This is something Michael Seaton, a founding headteacher who oversaw the opening King’s College Doha’s primary and secondary campuses, and is who now based in Kazakhstan, says is vital to get right.

“One thing that can change the culture of a school is when people don’t see each other any more because they are working on different campuses,” he says.

“So finding ways to have cross-campus CPD days and lesson study partnerships will help to prevent drift.”

A united front for parents

Avoiding that drift was a priority for Seaton when he oversaw the opening of a second campus at King’s College Doha in 2025, both because of the daily realities like the above but also because he wanted it to stay true to the school’s core mission, vision and values.

“You need a unifying identity,” says Seaton, echoing what many a multi-academy trust leader says in the UK.

“What’s our vision? What are our values? What’s our teaching and learning model? How do we observe lessons? How do we mark books? All those things should be really, really clear.”

To achieve this, Seaton says that, while much of modern leadership is focused on distributed leadership, he had to be “very directive as a leader” to ensure that everything aligned, even down to newsletters being matched for branding and layout so that parents with children at both campuses didn’t sense divergence: “I was determined not to allow drift in terms of brand and how parents were perceiving the two entities.”

The issue of parents not seeing a gap between two campuses is something that Mark Steed, a former head at two multi-campus international schools - Kellett School Hong Kong and Jumeirah English Speaking School (JESS) in Dubai - says is important, especially if the campuses sit in different demographic areas.

Kellett School Hong Kong’s original campus

For instance, the original Kellett campus on Hong Kong Island was predominantly white and Western while the newer campus, the Kowloon Bay campus, had a more diverse pupil population.

Ideally, pupils from the original campus moved to the Kowloon Bay campus to complete their secondary education. But it was a “big sell” for families living on the island, who tended to conduct all their business there, says Steed.

There was, therefore, “a psychological barrier” when it came to considering moving their children between campuses, as well as a physical barrier of crossing Hong Kong harbour.

Kellett School Hong Kong’s Kowloon Bay campus

Steed says one way they tackled this was by organising events at the Kowloon Bay campus - such as the whole-school annual concert or swimming galas - to get parents to visit.

“Wherever we could we would nudge them across so that they realised it wasn’t that difficult to get across and this was their senior school,” he adds.

Meanwhile, to make that transition as smooth as possible for pupils, both campuses came together for trips and activities - for instance, Steed remembers a Year 6 trip to Tokyo for 10 days that involved the pupils at that age and stage from both campuses coming together.

“They’d all got these shared experiences, which I think was quite important so that the prep school students who had gone to one campus felt very secure with the ones from the other campus so they became one year group very quickly.”

The reality of autonomy

However, while such efforts are necessary, Steed says multi-campus leaders have to acknowledge that there will always be some variations between sites, especially if teaching different age groups, and so there is “a need for a little bit of local autonomy” - but this is not always easy to accept.

For instance, curricular alignment between schools can become “like a religion” and “almost fanatical”, with “everyone having to teach the same thing on the same day in the same way”, says Steed - something he says can be “an enormous waste of middle leadership time”.

He adds: “I always used to think of it as a flotilla - the three headteachers were in their own ships, making their own decisions, but we all had to sail in the same direction, and my role was to ensure that.”

Seaton agrees that the head on each campus needs “localised autonomy” - and this also means parents always have a figurehead to approach: “I was very conscious [when working across two sites] that I didn’t want a situation where, if I was spending three days at one campus and two days at the other, both sets of parents said they never saw me.”

This structure is similar to BST where, although Clayton goes between both sites each week, the school has a head of primary and a head of secondary. “It is useful for all stakeholders to know that there is a consistent person who is there for all sorts of needs,” he says.

“Clearly, I cannot be at both sites simultaneously.”

This is a point that Dr Becky Jobes, assistant head at Frankfurt International School (FIS), which has campuses 35 minutes apart by car, agrees with: it’s about “trying to bring equilibrium where possible”, she says, but also about “being comfortable” when it is not.

Selling the difference

For example, FIS’ Wiesbaden campus is home to around 200 pupils from preschool to Grade 8, while its Oberursel campus caters for around 1,600 pupils from preschool to Grade 12.

And while there is much that connects the two campuses - both deliver the International Baccalaureate (IB) Primary Years Programme, there are whole-school events and staff come together for professional development - the fact they are different is an asset. The different sizes of the campuses mean they appeal to different families, students and staff.

Last year, for instance, Jobes, who oversees the Wiesbaden campus, says she saw movement of students both ways.

Some moved from Oberursel to Wiesbaden because a more intimate campus suited their needs; others moved from Wiesbaden to Oberursel because they wanted to pursue a sport or activity that wasn’t offered at the smaller campus.

“That’s the positive tension of having schools that are such different sizes: both of them have different elements that allow people to thrive,” says Jobes.

These differences also mean that practices that begin at one campus can spread to the other.

For instance, Oberursel introduced multi-age classes (it has a multi-grade classes for grades 2 and 3, as well as a grade 4 and a grade 5) after Wiesbaden staff had introduced this model and seen notable improvements as a result.

James Stenning, executive principal at Four Forest Schools in Switzerland, which has campuses in Zug and Lucerne some 40 minutes apart by car, recognises this benefit, too, noting that what is on offer at each site appeals to a different clientele.

The Zug campus is “much more international”, he says, while the Lucerne campus is “much more Swiss”.

“For example, in Zug we do a lot more clubs and activities after school because that’s what international parents want, whereas local families tend to organise that themselves in the local community.”

However, this does not mean there is no alignment, with both schools delivering a bilingual international curriculum and the head of teaching and learning and curriculum working across both schools to ensure consistency of approach in that arena.

Stenning says: “His role is to ensure that what’s being delivered in both schools is broadly the same and to create opportunities for collaboration between teachers.”

Clearly, then, the act of managing multi-campus schools is an art rather than a science, and everything from pupil age and stage to parent populations and facilities plays a part in how the balance of uniformity versus autonomy is managed.

Management is most definitely required, though, so, just as the Shibuya Crossing needs traffic lights to prevent chaos and confusion, multi-campus schools require structure and deliberate thought to ensure that they run like clockwork.