Nord Anglia Education and IMG Academy announce global sports and education collaboration

Premium international schools provider Nord Anglia Education today announced a global collaboration with IMG Academy, a global leader in sports education.

Representing the first global sports education collaboration of its kind for international schools, IMG Academy will join Nord Anglia’s existing collaborations with world-leading institutions including MIT, The Juilliard School, and UNICEF. The two organisations will create an enhanced sports programme for Nord Anglia’s 75,000+ students with a focus on wellbeing, resilience, confidence, teamwork, and leadership.

The partnership complements today’s announcement that BPEA EQT, part of the private equity group, EQT, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire IMG Academy from Endeavor. The two companies anticipate the deal will close in the third quarter of this year.

Nord Anglia will have access to IMG Academy’s sports curriculum, while students from its 82 schools will have opportunities to travel to IMG Academy’s stunning 400-acre campus to participate in exclusive programmes delivered by leading coaches and sports psychologists.  The IMG Academy sports programme for Nord Anglia students will be rolled-out following closing in a phased approach to all its schools starting during the 2023-24 academic year.

Nord Anglia’s teachers and athletic coaches will also benefit from annual training workshops and ongoing professional development with IMG Academy experts. More than 500 former college and professional athletes and coaches are on IMG Academy’s coaching team, providing expertise, and sharing valuable lessons from their experiences.

IMG Academy today supports the entire student-athlete development journey via a sports-focused boarding school, sports camps, online coaching, and online college recruiting that serve in total more than 100,000 student-athletes. A clear leader in sports education, IMG Academy helped place more than 30,000 students into college sports rosters in 2022.

A cornerstone of IMG Academy’s education approach is its classroom-based and on-field integration of a highly intentional personal development curriculum. Both on-campus and online, IMG Academy offers a multi-pillar programme designed to hone abilities that school performance experts have identified over time as critical to student-athletes’ achievement and wellbeing.

In addition to the new global sports programme, Nord Anglia will partner with IMG Academy following closing to further enhance and diversify IMG Academy’s academic curriculum, create new staff development pathways, and introduce its best practices into teaching and learning for student-athletes. These efforts will further cement IMG Academy’s sports education platform which provides world-class holistic education, on and off the field.

Andrew Fitzmaurice, CEO of Nord Anglia Education, said: “The learning experiences we create through our global partnerships with Juilliard, MIT, UNICEF and IMG Academy, stretch far beyond the classroom. They’re designed to help our students develop important life skills that go hand-in-hand with impressive academic results, so they leave our schools with everything they need for success in the future. Our new partnership will create an exciting sports programme offering outstanding experiences for our students and further bring to life the importance of wellbeing, resilience, teamwork, and leadership. Our teachers around the world will benefit from access to professional development in the critical areas of sports and wellbeing through IMG Academy’s world leading coaching staff and curriculum.”

Dr Elise Ecoff, Chief Education Officer of Nord Anglia Education, said: “Our global partnerships are designed as part of our curriculum to challenge our students to achieve more than they could ever imagine possible inside and outside of the classroom. Our work with IMG Academy is exciting, because it’s taking sport’s values of health, wellbeing, teamwork, and leadership and teaching them to students as a way of life.”

Brent Richard, President of IMG Academy, said: “Our purpose is to empower student-athletes to win their future, preparing them for college and for life. We are constantly trying to raise the bar in pursuit of that purpose across all our on-campus and online experiences. Simultaneously, our staff are passionate about growing the impact we have on the world, reaching more families, and helping them on their journey. This collaboration with Nord Anglia Education is exactly what we need to achieve and accelerate those goals, and we are excited for that future.”