Jerudong International School -- JIS to everyone who knows it -- follows the British National Curriculum from nursery through year 13, offering A Levels, the International Baccalaureate Diploma, and BTEC qualifications. What sets it apart is not the curriculum but the context. This is Brunei, a nation of mosques and oil wealth on the northwest coast of Borneo, and JIS weaves that identity into a thoroughly British educational framework. The Ugama School, established within JIS in 2005, provides compulsory religious education for Bruneian Muslim students, a requirement codified by national law in 2012. Students sit for the Religious Primary Schools Certificate alongside their IGCSEs. In 2019, the school became the first international school in the world to achieve 'Outstanding' -- the highest possible rating -- in all nine areas of a British Schools Overseas inspection conducted by PENTA International, the overseas accreditation body for OFSTED.

JIS has produced a remarkable concentration of competitive swimmers for a school of 1,660 students. Zeke Chan, who ended Brunei's medal drought at the Southeast Asian Games, trained here. So did Anderson Lim, who represented Brunei at the 2012 Olympics, and Zachary Payne, who swam for the Cook Islands that same year. Joshua Yong competed for Australia at the 2024 Summer Olympics. The school's Sports Complex, opened in January 2017, houses two indoor multi-purpose courts, a 25-meter indoor pool with eight lanes, and an outdoor 50-meter pool with four lanes. But the alumni roster extends well beyond the pool. Phil Wang, the British-Malaysian stand-up comedian, walked these halls. So did Prince Abdul Mateen and Prince Abdul Malik, sons of the Sultan of Brunei, and Anisha Rosnah, who married into the royal family. Wushu athlete Basma Lachkar won a silver medal at the 2023 Asian Games in Hangzhou.

The JIS Arts Centre houses a theatre, a Black Box performance space, an art gallery, a dance studio, and a conference room. It has hosted the Toyota Classics Orchestra since 2012, and in 2017, the Earl and Countess of Wessex visited. But the centre's most extraordinary possession is a Fazioli concert grand piano, a gift from Crown Prince Al-Muhtadee Billah. After the JIS Orchestra -- one of the few orchestras in all of Brunei -- performed a private concert for the prince, he presented them with the Brunei model of the Fazioli, crafted with inlays of precious stones, mother of pearl, and exotic woods. The instrument is reportedly worth over $400,000. Meanwhile, at the other end of the campus, the Outdoor Discovery Centre occupies 10,000 square meters of land being actively reforested by students. The project earned JIS the Global Eco Schools Green Flag Award in 2022, and students maintain fruit gardens, harvest rainwater, create eco-art, and tend hives of stingless bees native to Borneo.

In June 2024, JIS became Brunei's first school to undertake a major solar installation, unveiling over 600 rooftop panels estimated to produce nearly 600,000 kilowatt-hours of energy annually. The move was striking for a country whose economy runs on fossil fuels -- Brunei is one of the largest oil and gas producers in Southeast Asia. For a school campus that already contained a reforestation project and a beekeeping program, solar panels were a natural next step. The boarding houses -- Eagle and Ibis for boys, Kingfisher and Osprey for girls -- accommodate over 200 students from age 11 onward, and the campus operates as a small, self-contained community. Between the arts centre, the sports complex, the forest trails, and now the solar array, JIS resembles less a school than a small, meticulously maintained principality within a principality.