Malvern College: how one of Britain’s oldest independent schools is rethinking the way it operates 

In conversation with Kaizen Institute 

Founded in 1865, Malvern College is a leading independent school educating students from across the world. It is widely recognised as a centre of academic excellence, with a long tradition of educating distinguished alumni, including Nobel Prize winners, and operates campuses in the United Kingdom, mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan and Egypt. When the introduction of VAT on independent school fees coincided with a significant rise in employer National Insurance contributions, COO Rob Breare faced a question the school had never had to ask in 165 years of existence: how do we fundamentally change the way we operate? 

His answer was unexpected. Instead of engaging with the consultancies that typically serve the education sector, he contacted Kaizen Institute. Breare had first encountered KAIZEN™ methodology more than fifteen years earlier in Kenya, and the memory of those conversations never left him. What followed was a programme that reached into every corner of the institution, from its academic leadership structure to the daily running of its eleven boarding houses. 

In this interview, Breare reflects on what drove that decision, what it took to bring a centuries-old institution into a data-driven improvement programme, and what he would tell any school leader considering the same commitment. 

Changing the game

Why did Malvern decide to adopt the KAIZEN™ methodology, and why did you see it aligning with the institution’s goals? 

– Rob 

My journey with Kaizen started more than fifteen years ago, when I was working at a school in Kenya. The chairman of the board was a globally successful flower farmer who had worked extensively with Kaizen to improve efficiency on his farms. He told wonderful stories, simple things, like people walking miles across warehouses to dispose of cut stems, until someone put a hole in the table and swept them straight in. Hours of wasted work, gone. Those stories struck a chord with me. 

Roll on fifteen years. At Malvern, we were facing the impact of VAT on school fees and suddenly found ourselves having to put fees up to a place most parents simply cannot afford.

Our concern was that if we went to the regular consultancies in education, we would get an echo chamber, the same ideas repeated. We needed to change the game.

Kaizen offered a way to re-examine everything we do, in a data-based, considered and genuinely practical way. 

A converging cost crisis

What made the financial pressure at Malvern structurally different from a standard cost-reduction challenge? 

– Rob

What many people do not realise is that VAT on school fees was only half of the story. The rise in employer National Insurance contributions was happening at the same time, and the combination drove the cost base up significantly. The structural problem in schools is that 70 per cent of your cost base is your staff. That is where the pressure concentrated. 

We had already spent eighteen to twenty-four months reducing costs in operational areas: catering, facilities, procurement. That work was largely done. 

Our top fees are in the region of £62,000 a year. The expectations from families at that level are quite significant — finding a way to be efficient without dropping quality was the challenge.

And that is the real beauty of Kaizen: if you eliminate the waste, you have a genuine opportunity to save money and improve quality at the same time. 

Bringing the institution along

What were the main challenges in bringing KAIZEN™ into an institution of Malvern’s age and complexity? 

– Rob

I always describe it as a relay race. Leadership at the top can be aligned on the strategic case for change. Bringing the whole organisation along is a different matter entirely. One thing I had learned strongly from that chairman in Kenya was that improvement must involve the people doing the day-to-day work getting their ideas, making them own what changes. 

The early workshops were about paradigm shift: simply giving staff permission to question what they had always done.

The feedback afterwards, people were smiling. It was a revelation. It just hadn’t occurred to them that they had permission to look at things completely differently.

There was also the belief that Kaizen must be for corporates, not schools. Getting people to realise that data and purpose are not mutually exclusive was a constant communication exercise.  And then there is the resourcing question.

Kaizen is not something where you bring in an outside agency and they do all the work. Everybody must pull their weight and doing it on top of their day jobs is a real challenge.

 The risk-reward equation had to be communicated, and communicated again. 

An unexpected first win

What were the first results you saw, and where did they come from? 

– Rob

The first significant result arrived earlier than I expected, and from an area I had not fully anticipated. A review of our academic leadership structure revealed a serious imbalance: certain individuals had far too many direct reports, and pastoral accountability had fragmented across multiple reporting lines. Students had several managers but no single advocate. Restructuring that model using the principles Kaizen Institute had helped us surface, but designed entirely by our own team restored individual accountability and freed up pastoral time at scale. That was the first quick win, and it turned out to be one of the most significant changes of the whole programme. 

Making the process visible

How did you bring the wider staff with you and how did you measure whether it was working? 

– Rob 

One of the best decisions we made was to make the entire process visible. We had post it note boards mapping findings and proposals displayed along the corridors outside the staff room, and all staff were invited to review them and hear work stream owners present their findings directly. Prior to that, there had been some suspicion:

What is this Kaizen thing? And then they were almost surprised by how open book it was.

That transparency resolved the gossip faster than any formal communication had managed. 

On the measurement side, we have eleven boarding houses at Malvern, and a pilot on standardising the experience across them exceeded all expectations. The KPI now is adoption: is everyone doing this consistently? 

You get a first flush of excitement, and then a slight dip as the hard work kicks in. We are definitely in that stage now, we have proven the benefit, and the question is how to make sure everybody lives it every day. 

A commitment, not a project

What would you tell a school leader who is considering adopting KAIZEN™ in their institution? 

– Rob

Kaizen is a commitment. You are not signing up for a three-month exercise after which everything is fixed. You are committing to changing the way in which you work and that requires an enormous amount of leadership from the top, and genuinely clever thinking about how to ensure everyone at the front line feels they own it rather than have it imposed on them. It always gets a little worse before it gets better. 

If you get the conditions right, the improvement becomes self-perpetuating. Getting to that phase takes time. It is a commitment I would absolutely make again. 

Key takeaways 

What Malvern College’s experience makes plain is that the perceived conflict between operational discipline and educational purpose is not a principled position, it is a habit of thought, and one that does not survive contact with evidence. The assumption that data-driven improvement belongs in manufacturing but not in schools had to be dismantled one conversation at a time, and that required sustained leadership rather than a single workshop. 

Two lessons emerge consistently from Breare’s account. Front-line ownership is not an optional feature of improvement programmes of this kind; it is the mechanism by which results become durable. And the dip the period of increased effort before visible results is predictable and must be named by leadership explicitly. Organisations that interpret it as evidence of failure will not reach the point at which the work becomes genuinely self-sustaining. 

Looking ahead 

The immediate context for Malvern’s programme was the UK tax environment, but Breare was clear that the ambition extended beyond it. In addition to its UK operations Malvern operates schools in mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan and Egypt, and from the outset, a core objective was establishing quality standards that would provide consistency both within the UK campus across its eleven boarding houses and across the international network. 

The question facing independent schools in the UK is no longer whether structural change is necessary, the financial pressures of 2024 made that question largely redundant. The question is how to pursue it without eroding what families are paying for.

As Rob Breare observed during the conversation: 

If you do eliminate the waste, you’ve genuinely got an opportunity to save money and improve quality at the same time.

That proposition, grounded in operational experience rather than aspiration, is what Malvern’s programme offers to the sector.