This article examines how British Satellite Colleges construct and communicate Britishness through heritage branding across global education markets. Focusing on Dulwich, Harrow and Wellington, it brings corporate heritage branding into dialogue with critical heritage studies through a multimodal analysis of public-facing school websites. We develop a critical corporate heritage branding framework, advance a critical understanding of “heritage stewardship” to explain how organisations govern heritage across time, place and context, and demonstrate how heritage stewardship produces aesthetic legitimacy. The analysis identifies three interrelated themes and one cross-cutting pattern: asserting historical lineage through narrative, materialising Britishness through crests, architecture, uniforms and colour, constructing Britishness as a moral, linguistic and organisational world, and examining the authorised local and the limits of localisation in contextualised satellites. The findings show that BSC heritage branding does not simply display British symbols overseas, but selectively assembles histories, values, aesthetic signs, institutional language and local adaptations into public-facing narratives of British educational authority. Read through critical heritage studies, these practices are not neutral. They foreground British prestige, continuity, moral formation and global opportunity while backgrounding commerce, empire, inequality and alternative educational traditions. The article contributes to scholarship on international schooling, corporate heritage branding and critical heritage studies by showing how Britishness becomes a contested, curated and commodified resource through which educational quality is made visible, desirable and legitimate in global education markets.
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Clark et al. (2026) studied this question.