In China you can see replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the Great Pyramid, St Peter’s Square and a large slice of Amsterdam. But more remarkable than any of them in its own way is a red-brick military-academy-style building in the Hongqiao district of Tianjin. It is a replica — or thereabouts — of Wellington College in Berkshire. And unlike a lot of other replicas, it wasn’t built by a Chinese property developer but by Wellington College itself.
Wellington College International Tianjin, which was opened by Prince Andrew in 2010, is more or less a full-size working model of its mother school, albeit without the full complement of rugby pitches (there is one Astroturf pitch) or boarding houses (its first boarders arrive this month). Its website brims with pictures of children playing the trombone, starring in last year’s production of Bugsy Malone and enjoying a school trip to Berlin. Only an uncommon emphasis on Mandarin — plus an invitation to translate the page into that language — give the game away that this is not a school in England.
Soon there will be a pair of Wellingtons in China: another replica is due to open in Shanghai next August. While the coalition dreams on about independent schools sponsoring academies in Britain, it is in the Far East that many are choosing to replicate themselves.
Dulwich College is well on its way to becoming an international brand, with three schools in China and one in Seoul. None is as architecturally derivative of their mother institution as are the Chinese Wellingtons — Shanghai has a rather half-hearted brick and concrete bell tower, but that is about it — but nevertheless seek to replicate a public-school experience. For team-building, they go camping on the Great Wall and building yurts in Inner Mongolia. There is even a Dulwich College Asia Games, at which all four Far Eastern branches compete.
Harrow, meanwhile, has cloned itself in Beijing, complete with boaters. Harrow was the first to beat a path to the Far East, opening in Bangkok in 1997. Shrewsbury followed in Bangkok in 2003.
You don’t necessarily have to have a big reputation to get in on the act: even Bromsgrove School now has an outpost in Thailand. There is one notable absentee: Eton refuses to have anything to do with the rush to the Far East, saying it would rather concentrate its energies at home.
It is difficult to know what to make of this oriental expansion. Does one take a fogeyish pride at the thought of children walking around Beijing in boaters, welcome the schools as a prime British export, us doing what we do best? Or ought we to worry that some of our leading schools are going to go the way of the Hilton hotel — once a byword for luxury, and now a name emblazoned in illuminated lettering on nasty concrete towers at every international airport?
‘There is a reputational risk if the Chinese school does badly, of course,’ says Anthony Seldon, master of the original Wellington College, or ‘Wellington Classic’ as the marketing men would no doubt call it. ‘But it is a prestigious thing to do. Wellington is one of the great schools of Britain and we can add to it by taking it to the great economic powerhouse of the 21st century.’
Financially, he says, there is no risk. The Chinese schools are private companies whose profits can be repatriated to support Wellington College in Berkshire, but money cannot flow the other way.
What do the parents of children at the Chinese schools think about some of their fees helping to fund the education of Wellington pupils 600 miles away? Parents who send their children to private schools in China are used to establishments being run for profit, he says, and so it is not an issue for them.
One thing you will not find much of in the Chinese outposts of British independent schools are Chinese pupils. Chinese children can attend Wellington College in Berkshire, but Chinese law prevents their parents sending them to international schools at home. The pupil roll of the British schools reflects the relative numbers of American, British and European businesspeople who have ventured out to China with their families. At Dulwich’s Beijing outpost, for example, only 35 per cent of pupils hail from Asia, while 26 per cent come from North America, 15 per cent from Britain and Ireland, 14 per cent from the rest of Europe and 8 per cent from Australia and New Zealand.
Wellington, however, has its eyes on the domestic Chinese market. As well as a third English-speaking international school, this one in Hong Kong, it is planning to open a Chinese-speaking school in Shanghai, which local children would be allowed to attend. This is potentially a huge, untapped market for British schools and education companies. As some US state schools have discovered, there is a significant number of well-off Chinese parents who do not like the ethos of China’s own schools and are prepared to spend large amounts of money sending the children to be educated abroad — even to schools which have less than golden reputations. Stearns High School in Millinochet, a fading mill town in Maine, might have closed were it not for 60 Chinese students enrolled there. It is no Wellington: only four in ten of its US pupils meet state standards for reading, writing, science and maths. Yet for the Chinese parents who are paying $13,000 per child in fees, and a further $11,000 in boarding costs, any American school is regarded as a stepping stone to Harvard and other US universities.
If the Maine experience is anything to go by, you don’t need to be a public school with a big reputation to attract Chinese parents. You just need to be able to offer a western-style education. Now that No. 10 has retracted its suggestion that British state schools could accept fee-paying overseas pupils, maybe a few of these academy chains should get on a plane to China and bang a few stakes in the ground.
From the Spectator’s Independent Schools supplement September 2013
Comments