Financial Times Rankings

20 May 2020, Johannesburg, South Africa. HENLEY Business School is in the top 25 in the world when it comes to executive education – and the best in Africa at providing this.

The authoritative Financial Times of London has ranked Henley at 24 in the world, number 16 in Europe, number five in the UK and number one in Africa for a business school accredited in Africa to run qualification programmes. Only two other African business schools made the top 50; the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) at 38 and Nigeria’s Lagos Business School at 47.

The rankings, which look at both Open Executive Education and Custom Executive Education, are universally recognised as a strong indicator of the quality of the programmes offered because they are largely determined by client and participant ratings.

Henley Business School Africa’s director of executive education, Linda Buckley, is particularly pleased with yet another very strong showing on the global stage.

“Executive education really is a dynamic partnership between the school, the delegates and the clients. What is particularly pleasing is that despite Henley being a global institution with campuses in the UK, Finland, Germany and Johannesburg and satellite operations literally across the world, a large percentage of the client and participant respondents in the custom education component were drawn from South Africa, further underscoring our position both here and globally.

“The FT’s rating, coming literally days after the announcement of our beating off the best business schools in the world to win a global award, the EFMD Excellence in Practice Gold Award for executive development in a collaboration between Henley Africa, GIBS  and Standard Bank to develop a strategic leadership programme for the bank’s  executives, is a further affirmation of exactly that.”

For Henley Africa dean and director Jon Foster-Pedley, the ranking is further proof of just how far the business school has come in the last nine years.

“We have worked hard to radically rebuild Henley Africa over the last nine years. When we started there was no executive education, either open or custom, to speak of at Henley Africa, only a handful of students doing an MBA. Today the executive education division, under the excellent leadership of Linda Buckley, amounts to 60% of Henley Africa’s income and is now a stand-alone business of $6-million per annum with more than 3 000 students a year. We have also been recognised for two years running as the no1 MBA business school in South Africa by PMR and two-thirds of Henley’s global MBA students are now from South Africa.”

Executive education has also played a major role in radically transforming how education is delivered and to whom at Henley Africa. The faculty is of global quality, working internationally, providing classes to delegates who are mostly up and coming managers, of whom 80% are black African and 60% women. Internationally, Henley’s custom programmes place in the world top 20 for faculty diversity.

Steve Ludlow, the head of Executive Education at Henley UK ascribes the business school’s success to its investment in innovation.

“This recognition of the quality of our work is an important encouragement for our clients, participants, staff and faculty during these challenging times. We expect that the world for executive education will look different post-COVID19, but we are well positioned to realign our programmes and services to meet the new challenges and opportunities that will emerge over the coming months.”

Henley Africa has been at the forefront of this innovation, successfully pivoting the entire executive education and MBA programmes online onto virtual platforms to enable unbroken teaching and learning during the lockdown.

“The education sector has to be committed to rebuilding the economy, creating jobs and prosperity beyond the pandemic,” explains Foster-Pedley, “and reinvented executive education, especially world-class cutting-edge programmes, will be critical to this.”