In 1977, the BBC sent the economist John Kenneth Galbraith to make a thirteen-part television series called The Age of Uncertainty. In Episode 9, on the corporation, Galbraith walked through the corridors of a peculiar school in Eindhoven where the children of Philips engineers from a dozen nations were taught in English. He had a line ready: "English is to the modern corporation as Latin was to the medieval church." That school was the Philips International School, founded in 1966. It is now called the International School Eindhoven, it has more than 1,200 students from dozens of countries, and it occupies a former Dutch army barracks. Galbraith's metaphor, fifty years on, looks if anything more true.
Philips was not just an Eindhoven employer in the 1960s - it was the city's gravity well. Engineers and managers arrived from France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and beyond, often for assignments of three to seven years. Their children needed schooling that would not strand them in a single national curriculum. In 1965 Philips founded the Philips International School for primary education. In 1974 the company helped launch a parallel English-medium secondary stream at a pre-existing Eindhoven school. The primary school was renamed Regional International School (RIS) in 1975 and added French and German streams alongside English. The secondary stream went independent in 1986 as the International Secondary School Eindhoven (ISSE) and moved to a 30-percent larger site at Venetiestraat 43 in 2001. Two parallel institutions, both born from one corporate need.
Since 1982 the school has offered the International Baccalaureate's Diploma Programme - the rigorous two-year sixth-form curriculum used by ambitious international schools worldwide. The IB shaped its identity more than any single national system could. The school now runs the Middle Years Programme (MYP) for five years and the Diploma Programme (DP) for two, with English as the medium throughout, Spanish and French as secondary languages in MYP, and Dutch compulsory at three levels - Foundation, Secondary Language, and Primary Language - because students live in the Netherlands and the school takes that responsibility seriously. Students who arrive with little English enter the English Language Learning (ELL) programme, sometimes pulled from regular classes to focus on reaching working fluency. Diploma students complete Theory of Knowledge, the Creativity-Action-Service requirement, and the Extended Essay - the three IB pillars that the framework is built around. MYP students in their fifth year complete 50 hours of community service and a Personal Project.
Discussions about merging RIS and ISSE began in 2006 - two schools serving overlapping families had grown inefficient. The merger was confirmed on 1 January 2009 under the International School Eindhoven (ISE) brand. In September 2013, the combined school moved to a wholly new campus on the Oirschotsedijk, in the north of Eindhoven near the airport. The site was a former Dutch military base called the Constant Rebecque Kazerne - an unusual second life for an army barracks. The campus covers around 17,000 square metres with about 7,000 square metres of building floor space: 30 classrooms (including four science labs, two visual-arts rooms, and a design technology workshop), two computer labs, a music room, a library with multimedia centre, four gym halls, and a multi-purpose hall that doubles as a theatre. Hermes runs buses from the city centre. The primary Dutch department was moved off-site at the start of the 2024 school year due to space pressure - a decision that drew loud objections from those parents.
The school has been a Model United Nations regular since the 1980s, winning Best Delegation Award multiple times at the major Hague conferences MUNISH and THIMUN. It runs FIRST LEGO League teams, sends students on annual ski trips to Austria or Switzerland, plays in the NECIS league for basketball, softball, football, and volleyball, and offers London trips and grade-wide adventure camps. None of which is particularly unusual for an international school - and that is the point. The IB is now a global standard. International schools cluster around every high-tech corridor and embassy quarter on earth. What was extraordinary in 1965, when Philips wrote it from scratch in Eindhoven, is now the routine answer for the families that ASML, Philips, NXP, and the Brainport ecosystem still bring here. Galbraith's Episode 9 metaphor - English the new Latin, the modern corporation the new church - has aged surprisingly well. The cathedral, in this case, used to be an army barracks.
The International School Eindhoven sits at 51.46°N, 5.43°E in the northern part of Eindhoven, very close to Eindhoven Airport (EHEH) and on the site of the former Constant Rebecque military barracks. From the air, look for low modern buildings around a converted barracks square, with athletics fields visible to the south. Direct overflight by EHEH arrival and departure traffic - active runway is 04/22. Eindhoven Airbase military operations also funnel through the same airspace. Flat terrain at ~20 m elevation. Quietest approach lines are from the north over the polder.