This disclosure provides a method, apparatus and computer program product to create a full homomorphic encryption (FHE)-friendly machine learning model. The approach herein leverages a knowledge distillation framework wherein the FHE-friendly (student) ML model closely mimics the predictions of a more complex (teacher) model, wherein the teacher model is one that, relative to the student model, is more complex and that is pre-trained on large datasets. In the approach herein, the distillation framework uses the more complex teacher model to facilitate training of the FHE-friendly model, but using synthetically-generated training data in lieu of the original datasets used to train the teacher.