Shrewsbury International School India Marks First Year at 150-Acre Bhopal Campus

The school has spent its first year building, largely from first principles, the academic, sporting, artistic and pastoral life intended to shape the pupils who follow its inaugural cohort.

The first cohort followed a programme centred on the Cambridge IGCSE and A-Level curriculum, alongside more than twenty sports. The campus includes India's first on-campus facilities for indoor rowing, fencing and scuba diving, while a full pastoral programme has been delivered across two boarding houses.

Solar power and water-harvesting infrastructure were incorporated into the campus from its earliest planning stages. A tree-planting programme across the grounds is also continuing into the school's second year.

In June 2026, Shrewsbury International School India opened the Sidney Centre for the Performing Arts, its purpose-built home for drama and music. The opening was marked by the school's first Speech Day, with Padma Shri-winning film critic and author Bhawana Somaaya joining as Guest of Honour.

Somaaya spoke to pupils about the arts as a discipline of truth-telling and urged them to question their own convictions as rigorously as they would defend them.

That same week, the school held its first Callover, the centuries-old Shrewsbury tradition in which every pupil's name is read aloud before the Headmaster at the close of the academic year. The tradition was observed for the first time on Indian soil.

The school's first year also involved creating traditions without an established template to follow. Dominic Tomalin, Founding Headmaster of Shrewsbury International School India, said: "There is no 'the way we've always done it' to fall back on in Year One. Every assembly, every house tradition, every small ritual that will one day feel timeless to a child in these classrooms had to be imagined, tested, and earned before it could become part of who we are."

Tomalin credited the school's founding pupils with establishing its tone, saying: "They arrived with nothing to go on but belief - courage, commitment, and a trust in something bigger than themselves, before there was any proof it would work."

Shrewsbury International School India has deliberately drawn on two traditions in shaping its first year: Shrewsbury's own, running back four centuries, and India's Gurukul model of educating the whole person rather than the mind alone.

These traditions are brought together under what the school terms its Salopian Virtues - Wisdom, Integrity, Courage, Kindness, Self-Mastery and Spirit - which inform both its daily and academic life.

Shrewsbury India has this month welcomed its second cohort of pupils, while admissions remain open for families considering a residential education of this kind.

Reflecting on the year now closed, Tomalin writes: "If we continue as we began, we are a legacy school in the making."

Shrewsbury International School India is located on a 150-acre campus in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, and is the first international campus of Shrewsbury School UK, founded in 1552, outside the United Kingdom.

For further information, visit www.shrewsburyindia.in.