von Bülow Education

Alexandra von Bülow founded the firm in 1994 in an old garden house in East Hendred, near Oxford. She came to the subject as a mother: her own children had moved to Sevenoaks School, and friends and family soon began asking her about British boarding schools. Her son Ferdinand Steinbeis, who took the IB at Sevenoaks and went on to the LSE and an MBA at INSEAD, has run the company since 2014. In 2020 the office moved from Oxford to Richmond, by which point the team had grown to ten.

The firm works only with British boarding schools and advises families from Germany, Austria and Switzerland in German. By its own count it currently works with around 110 schools. A family usually receives three to five suggestions, after which the team makes introductions, plans visits and prepares the child for entrance tests and interviews. A Client Liaison Team handles paperwork, school visits and entrance-test arrangements, and the firm helps with visa applications, packing and travel. Besides moves for a whole school career, the firm also arranges short stays and single terms.

The support does not end on the first day of school. The firm describes its own First-Response Guardian service, a German-speaking emergency contact available around the clock, as a new addition, and it helps pupils settle in. It also knows the IB from the schools' side: its timeline says that from 1999 it advised several British schools that were bringing in the International Baccalaureate.