Bowmarks seals two deals in school travel sector

The first investment is the £22m buyout of Norwich-based Kingswood Educational Group, one of the UK’s leading providers of educational activity and adventure trips for schools. Founded in 1980, Kingswood operates 16 centres in the UK, and one in France, which provide residential and day educational activity courses to primary and secondary school groups. The business provides these services to approximately 130,000 children per year from over 2,500 schools. It also operates a summer camp business trading under the Camp Beaumont brand name. Bowmark Capital provided £10m of equity to finance the acquisition, with the balance provided by senior debt from the Corporate & Structured Finance South team at The Royal Bank of Scotland.

At the same time, Bowmark announced the £6m acquisition of Equity Ltd by its portfolio company, The School Travel Group (STG). STG is one of the UK’s leading specialist school travel companies, and was acquired for £16m in December last year. Bowmark provided £1.8m of equity to finance STG’s acquisition of Equity, with the balance largely provided by senior debt, again from the Corporate & Structured Finance South team at The Royal Bank of Scotland.

Bowmark has now invested a total of £18m of equity in the school travel sector in the past eight months, in three transactions with a total enterprise value of £44m.

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• Topics
• Buyouts
• UK / Ireland