SINGAPORE (Bloomberg): Rugby School is steeped in over 400 years of history. Its playing fields are where a pupil invented the game of rugby in 1823, exhibiting "a fine disregard” for the rules of football. Parents can buy into this prestige for roughly £59,000 per year, per child.

This autumn, one class of Rugbeians is beginning its studies over 3,000 miles from those famous Warwickshire fields.

Rugby School Nigeria is welcoming its first sixth-form students to a sprawling new campus on reclaimed land along the Lagos coastline, with younger pupils to follow soon.

The academic outpost is the brainchild of Rugby School Global, a subsidiary that presides over the school’s growing number of foreign sites, and Eko Atlantic, a new district built on land dredged from the sea in Nigeria’s financial capital.

The arrangement is part of a boom in British private schools setting up abroad in a bid to drive revenue, at a time when cost pressures at home are rising. Fee-paying schools in the UK educate just 7% of the population, but this cohort includes many political leaders, Nobel laureates and the upper echelons of society.

Previously, families across the globe would have aspired to ship their children here for an elite education. Now, more options than ever are on their doorstep. The UK government has lent its support to these efforts by British institutions to team up with companies overseas to establish and sometimes run schools. But expansion comes with the risk of partnerships that don’t live up to their centuries-old reputations.

Under Pressure

There are roughly 2,500 private schools in the UK, with about half holding charitable status.

The British-international school boom has been "recent and large,” according to the Private Education Policy Forum thi