There’s a website run by the Council on Foreign Relations called the Global Conflict Tracker that lists wars and confrontations between nations around the world.

Right now this map is awash with dots: Venezuela, Iran, Ukraine, Israel and many more countries across Africa, South America and the Middle East. What’s more, while each dot represents one specific nation, the impact of each crisis ripples outwards.

In short, the world has not felt this strained for quite some time - as Paul Stares, who is director of the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations and who oversees the Global Conflict Tracker, explains.

“The current level of armed conflict in the world is at its highest since the end of World War Two,” he tells Tes. “Over the last 12 months, for example, 10 capital cities were struck by other state actors.”

Given this, it’s no surprise that the Council of British International Schools’ (COBIS) annual report has, for the past two years, highlighted schools reporting a raft of impacts from geopolitical events.

Overall, 55 per cent of respondents to COBIS’ survey in 2025 said their school had felt an impact from a geopolitical situation - either a significant impact (17 per cent) or a moderate one (38 per cent).

These impacts are wide-ranging, too - from an increase in anxiety among students (cited by 37 per cent of respondents) or wellbeing issues (28 per cent) to conflicts and confrontations between pupils (26 per cent).

As reported recently, the war in the Middle East is having a huge impact, with schools switching to remote learning, and wider concerns already forming around teacher recruitment and retention and sector growth in the region.

“International school growth in the Gulf has historically been built on stability, inward talent flows and investor confidence in long-term demand,” says Tony Atkinson, from ISC Research.

“The current situation will test those assumptions. Families may delay relocation decisions, employers may slow new assignments, and developers may revisit enrolment projections.”

Another world event that has been causing friction for some international schools is the war between Russia and Ukraine, with one school leader in Europe saying that when that conflict began, their school had pupils from both nations and this made communications on the situation difficult.

“It was impossible to choose the right wording,” they say. “You couldn’t call it an invasion - the Russians weren’t happy with that because it was a ‘special military operation’. But as far as the Ukrainians were concerned, it was totally an invasion.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, pupils from these nations also had differences that became heated.

“We have had disagreements between kids where one was Russian, one was Ukrainian, and we had to pull them aside and say, ‘Here, in this school we share a common ethos and we have to put those differences aside,’” the school leader says.

Meanwhile, at Sir Manasseh Meyer International School (SMMIS) in Singapore, principal Elaine Robinson says the attacks on Israel in October 2023 were a moment of heightened tension.

“We’re a Jewish school, but we have 55 per cent non-Jewish kids, including many Muslim pupils and over 30 different nationalities,” she tells Tes.

“[After the attacks] was tricky but we managed it,” she adds - explaining that the school focused on getting students to recognise the reality that not everyone will agree with them.

“We tell them it’s OK for us to disagree with each other, as long as those disagreements are made in a respectful way,” Robinson says.

She adds that being in Singapore helps with this because the nation’s commitment to a multicultural way of life and being accepting of others makes it possible to have deep conversations in a safe space.

“We teach them to be articulate, to know who they are, to meet others in a peaceful way, but not to back down or give up the conversation because it’s scary,” Robinson says.

“We can do that because we have the luxury of being able to have these conversations without kids leaving school and getting antisemitic abuse or anti-Islam abuse.”

Different points of view

Sam Gipson, principal of Kinabalu International School in Malaysian Borneo and chair of the Association of International Malaysian Schools, agrees that getting children to think about things from different points of view - especially on a topic where they have a personal connection - is a key skill for international schools.

“Sometimes if [a student] raises issue X, we try to use that as a discussion about issue Y that’s completely unrelated, to get their minds thinking,” he says.

“And the intention is not necessarily to change their perception of issue X, but to give them a tool to start unpacking [situations] from a different point of view, so the next thing they approach they may start to see it from a different perspective.”

Julia Campbell-Ratcliffe, head of secondary school at Strothoff International School in Germany, has a similar perspective, saying that as an International Baccalaureate school, this in inherent in how it educates pupils.

“We are global citizens, and that’s what we are educating the kids to be,” she says.

“So we say, ‘Yes, you may feel very strongly about certain perspectives, but at the same time you cannot generalise that everyone in our community has the same beliefs.’”

Campbell-Ratcliffe says this appeal to commonality is what many parents want and it is part of why they chose an international school in the first place.

“We have a very diverse student and parent community, and part of parents’ wish when they entrust their children with us is to have that international and global perspective in the education,” she says.

Taking a neutral approach

This balanced approach is even found in schools where crises hit closer to home, as Brad Dean Baudach, head of secondary school at Rygaards International School in Denmark, explains in relation to the issue of Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland.

“I don’t think Denmark has ever been so much in the news as it has in the last few weeks,” he says.

Baudach says the US president’s wish to take over Greenland was “high on the agenda” in students’ discussions at school - Rygaards has both a Danish school and an international school - but that the issue was not actively spoken about in classes.

“It wasn’t something that we chose to focus on because our approach with these politically charged topics is to stay as neutral as you can,” he explains.

This doesn’t mean not talking about events, though. “Staff are free to talk about it with pupils [if they raise it], but they shouldn’t take sides…we have to stay neutral about it, and that can be difficult,” Baudach says.

Parents are usually entirely on board with this approach, he adds. “There’s no expectation from the parents that we should take [sides].”

This is clearly an approach adopted by many schools, with 46 per cent of respondents to the COBIS survey reporting that they choose not discuss geopolitical events to keep school as a “safe space, set apart from global conflicts”.

Flying the flags

Trying to remain neutral can be difficult, though - not least when celebrating global events or using flags, which, as one leader recounts, can cause problems.

“Our ground staff put up flags all around the school and ended up inadvertently putting the Israeli flag right at the front gates,” says the leader.

“Very quickly the question was raised…‘Is that appropriate?’ Not meaning is it appropriate to fly the Israeli flag itself, but the placement. So we had to have discussions about that.”

The flags of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan can also be problematic if there are Chinese pupils and families present, the same leader explains.

“We had a letter from one of our mainland Chinese students voicing concern around those flags, which resulted in quite a dialogue around why we have elected to fly them.”

Robinson in Singapore says flags can also lead to questions from pupils, but the response is always to be inclusive for all students.

“We always say that if a child has a passport for a country, we will fly those flags,” she says.

“Kids are not responsible for what their prime minister or president might be doing, and they might still feel quite strongly about their own national identity.”

One international leader, speaking anonymously, says these situations often highlight when students are “bringing their parents’ prejudices into school”. In the COBIS survey, 37 per cent of respondents cited parents’ views on geopolitical events affecting student behaviour.

Such views can also result in overt confrontations between parents, with 24 per cent of school leaders in the research reporting such incidents.

‘I probably had to whistle-blow maybe six times over teachers just within my school’

For example, the anonymous head above says their school has seen “awkwardness and dirty looks” between Indian and Pakistani staff and parents, and Egyptian and Sudanese staff and parents, “when events have flared up [in those countries]”.

Such situations - while rare - usually result in calling parents in for “separate meetings to remind them about tolerance and coexistence in our jurisdiction”, to help smooth things over, the leader adds.

The data also shows that conflicts and confrontations between staff are not uncommon - although perhaps less prevalent, with just 8 per cent reporting this.

This is an issue that one teacher who has worked in five countries says they have seen become notably worse in the past few years.

“I’d say, over the past four years, I probably had to whistle-blow maybe six times over teachers just within my school,” they say. “This has been rampant, especially since the attacks on Israel.”

Backlash over university choices

There is another way in which the impact of geopolitics is manifesting in schools - how students are making decisions for their onwards study options.

For instance, Adam McRoy, headmaster of Cogdel Cranleigh School Changsha in China, says the bellicose attitude of the US under Donald Trump has turned many students away from studying there.

“We’ve seen a massive drop-off in students going to the US,” he says, noting that where before Ivy League and liberal arts universities in the US were always a top choice, now universities in Hong Kong and Singapore are a lot more popular.

He adds that this was already the case to some degree when he took up his job in 2021, but since Covid, and given the fact that “China-US relations aren’t great at the moment”, very few students now consider the US.

Matt Topliss, head of Kyoto International School in Japan, has seen a similar effect, noting, for example, how issues like the legal dispute president Trump has had with Harvard University over withholding funding, and ICE raids against immigrants in the US, have affected students’ choices on further study.

“Parents are keen to keep their kids closer to them and certainly not send them into an environment in the US where they might be picked on because their accent is different, or the colour of their skin might be perceived as different,” he says.

An uncertain future

The turbulence of global affairs and how this is impacting the international nature of education - within schools and beyond - is something that the Council of International Schools’ director, Jane Larsson, spoke to Tes about recently, too.

“There was a whole period where international education was exploding in terms of growth, and the universities were largely driving that and welcoming international students,” she said.

“Now, all of a sudden, what’s happening? Governments are putting the brakes on and saying, ‘It’s too much. We want to go back to our roots. We have too many people coming in.’”

Stares at the Council on Foreign Relations acknowledges that this is all very different from the stability of the start of the century - and says there is little to suggest the situation will get any better.

“This trend [of conflicts between nations] is occurring, moreover, as the threat of major power conflict is growing - something considered highly unlikely at the beginning of the 21st century.”

As such, international schools currently being buffeted by the winds of change should not expect respite any time soon.