Top of the class

Why are Britain’s schools and universities becoming so popular with Chinese students, their parents and the country’s investors? Not all the locals are happy.

“The splendid thing about education is that everyone wants it. Like influenza, you can give it away without losing any of it yourself.”

So wrote Evelyn Waugh, the novelist famous for lampooning the foibles and snobberies of the English upper class during the early 20th century inter-war years. Waugh’s depictions of casual cruelty at obscure public schools and Oxbridge hedonism lives on in the British public’s imagination.

But not, it seems, in China. Over the past decade, a British education and its curriculum has become an increasingly popular and prestigious option for students at home and abroad.

As we wrote in WiC 459, this seems certain to accelerate thanks to Sino-US rivalry, which has prompted a more restrictive attitude towards Chinese students studying at American universities. The data is already starting to back this up.

During the 2019 admissions cycle, 19,760 Chinese students applied to study at British universities, 30% more than the 15,240 who applied the year before. For the first time, Chinese applications overtook Northern Irish ones. During 2018, there were 106,430 Chinese students at UK universities.

This put the country in the number three spot globally behind the US on 363,341 Chinese students and Australia on 152,712.

In January, the government published a policy document outlining ambitions to boost education-related export revenues to £30 billion ($37.26 billion) by 2030, up from £19.9 billion in 2016 (its most recent figure). This includes revenues generated by foreign students studying at schools, training centres and universities in the UK and what British educational providers earn abroad.

However, while the jump sounds impressive, education specialists pointed out that the previous 2015 policy paper established 2020 as the £30 billion target date. For while Chinese student numbers have grown, they have not climbed as much as they might have done thanks to a clampdown on international students visas, which helped Australia to cement its position above the UK in the rankings.

This started to change last summer as the UK began preparing for Brexit and the loss of EU funding and its students. In addition to simplifying the visa process, it allowed foreign graduates at 23 universities to apply for six-month post study work visas and post-doctoral students for one-year ones.

The attractions of the UK education system for Chinese students are manifold. They include: learning the world’s lingua franca, developing a broader cultural outlook and entering an educational system that purports to balance academic achievement, pastoral care and extra-curricular activities in a way that promotes independent thinking, leadership and teamwork.

For a nation like China, which often venerates foreign brands over its own, the ultimate educational cachet is an Oxbridge degree. As we wrote in WiC 137, the University of Cambridge is particularly alluring for many Chinese because of the poet, Xu Zhimo, whose most famous poem “Second Farewell to Cambridge” is part of the Chinese curriculum.

In 2018, his alma mater, Kings College, opened a memorial garden to commemorate his time there (or cash in depending on your view). Walking through the city today, the large uptick in Chinese students, tourists and long-term residents is palpable.

The University of Manchester is also extremely popular and has the largest Chinese student cohort overall (12.5% of the 40,000 studying there). That is partly thanks to the brand awareness generated by the city’s football teams and partly because of Xi Jinping who visited the university’s National Graphene Institute in 2015.

The UK’s independent school system is also popular with Chinese parents, although an informal cap on numbers means that it has not been the stepping-stone to Oxbridge that many Chinese parents hoped it would be. A second WiC reader notes how every single year, the boarding school they act as a governor for is inundated with applications and the promise of donations in return for a place.

Some Chinese groups have started buying British schools instead (Princess Diana’s old school, Riddlesworth Hall, is now owned by a direct descendent of Confucius for instance). The most active group has been Country Garden’s education offshoot, Bright Scholar, which has a portfolio of 69 schools and kindergartens across nine Chinese provinces.

The New York-listed group’s most recent acquisition is CATS Colleges, purchased for $192 million this month. It gains campuses in Cambridge, London and Canterbury in the UK, Shanghai in China and Boston in the US.

One month earlier, it purchased St Michael’s School in Carmarthenshire and Bosworth Independent College in Northampton for £38 million. It set its international expansion plan in motion last October with the acquisition of Bournemouth Collegiate College.

Chinese news site, Jiemian, believes that Bright Star’s M&A spree is designed to “help Chinese students to enter foreign universities.” It will also help it to diversify away from the US, which accounted for 46% of the students China sent abroad last year.

The UK has been very welcoming of Chinese educational investment and student arrivals. So was Waugh right: that it is possible to give education away without losing any of it yourself?

Earlier this year, Barnaby Lenon, Chairman of the Independent Schools Council, told the UK’s Daily Telegraph that struggling private schools should be “jolly pleased” to receive Chinese cash. He also believes Chinese ownership and students help UK pupils to develop a “sense of globalisation,” which they all need in order to thrive these days.

Most social media commentators do not agree, fearing that Chinese students will crowd out British ones applying to universities. “What planet is this idiot living on?” said one. “It has nothing whatsoever to do with helping the local economy or people, more like helping themselves to everything.”

Another potentially lucrative outcome of Chinese interest in British schooling is the export of some of its leading brands. Harrow School pioneered the concept when it established an international school in Bangkok in 1998. It now has schools in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong too.

Wellington College then helped to lead the charge into China, establishing its first international offshoot in Tianjin in 2011. At the time, its head said the Chinese entity would mirror the British in all but one respect: they couldn’t field a cricket team because there was no one to play against.

That has certainly changed in the eight years since then. British schools have not only taught Chinese students to play cricket but also marketed themselves as the kind of institutions, which teach the values associated with it (it’s not cricket originating as a term of un-gentlemanly behaviour).

ISC Research calculates that there are now 857 international schools in China and 563 offering an international education to Chinese students. The Chinese curriculum is compulsory until grade nine. After that, about 40% of schools deploy the British curriculum (GCSEs and A-Levels), while 26% use the US system and 15% study for the international baccalaureate.

The number of British private schools setting up is growing fast and extending far beyond big brand names like Harrow, Wellington and Westminster. New arrivals include Reigate Grammar (building a school in Nanjing) and Derbyshire’s Repton School (planning to open bilingual schools in the Greater Bay Area).

They all say they will plough some of the profits back into bursaries at home that fund students from lower income families, fending off calls to remove their privileges. Indeed, in the same week that Bright Star brought CATS, the former Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, signed up to the ‘Abolish Eton’ campaign that wants to force private schools into state sector management.

Yet not everyone is sure that China is going to be a money-spinner. Bird & Bird education lawyer, Mark Abell, told the Financial Times that profits could be limited unless the schools can achieve larger economies of scale.

However, the reputational advantages of Britain’s education brand remain compelling for the Chinese. The Irony is that Chinese parents want to send their children to British private schools because of the same sense of privilege and prestige that the ‘Abolish Eton’ campaigners dislike so much.