Review of Green School Bali: A Year of Broken Promises

We enrolled our daughter at Green School Bali with great hopes. The school promotes itself as a world-leading centre for sustainability and environmental education, with a side helping of social justice and critical engagement with colonisation. It promises something bold and groundbreaking – a place where children will learn to live responsibly on the planet while gaining the tools to become future changemakers. The reality of one year inside this community was deeply disappointing.

First, the culture of the school community is overwhelmingly North American, with a large and unexpected overlap of yoga enthusiasts who openly support Trump. More than 70% of families are not there for education at all, but rather for the Instagram lifestyle of living in Bali for a year while their children are left to “run wild” in a jungle setting. The result of this free-for-all is a classroom culture that is chaotic, with behaviour that is frequently disrespectful – particularly towards local Indonesian teachers, who are sometimes on the receiving end of casual racism as well as disregard for authority. What could have been a nurturing and challenging environment instead felt like a social club for wealthy immigrants.

The privilege is intense, and it shows up in both attitudes and actions. Rules are openly flouted: parents set up unlicensed coaching businesses and new luxury villas are carved out of rice fields. Most strikingly, a Green School staff member has been clearing jungle land directly beside the campus to build a workspace and Padel court for parents. For a school that trumpets integrity and environmental stewardship, the hypocrisy is staggering.

Our most serious concerns, however, were around safeguarding. Over the year, we reported four separate incidents we considered potential safeguarding issues. The responses from the school were dismissive, defensive, and often gaslighting. Internet safety on campus is appalling, with students openly gambling online and toxic misogyny left unchecked. When we asked for a management meeting, we were ignored. A parents’ meeting was eventually arranged, but instead of addressing issues collectively it became an exercise in image-management for the Head of Middle School.

The final straw was our daughter’s experience with the student culture. She was subjected to relentless sexualised language and behaviour from her peers. Only a handful of students in her year seemed unaffected. Despite the support of a few excellent teachers, she could not continue in such an environment, and we made the decision to withdraw her.

Beyond the classroom, the disconnect between the school’s branding and its reality is impossible to ignore. There is no genuine activism, only superficial dives into sustainability education, no accountability, and no safeguarding culture. Instead, there is a community of privileged families enjoying their Bali lifestyle while pushing up land prices and displacing local communities. The school’s claim to be carbon neutral is laughable, given that it depends on 600 families flying in from around the world to enrol, most of whom then construct luxury villas over rice paddies.

Worst of all, this bubble of wealthy immigrants, drawn in by the Green School brand, drives up costs for everyone else, making housing and land unaffordable for local Balinese families. Traditional rice paddies are lost to concrete villas, cultural integrity is eroded, and the very people who should benefit from so-called “sustainable education” are instead pushed to the margins.

For us, Green School Bali has been the most disappointing educational experience we have ever encountered. We paid a premium price for glossy promises and received an unsafe, shallow, and hypocritical reality. Do not believe the hype or the beautifully manicured publicity.