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UK private school to tap into China Graham Able, headmaster, said Dulwich had secured the licences to establish schools for students from kindergarten to high school graduation in both Beijing and Shanghai.
The London school, founded in 1619 and where writer PG Wodehouse and former Bank of England governor Sir Eddie George were pupils, opened a kindergarten in Shanghai last year, tapping into a market where an obsession with education costs households an estimated Rmb300bn ($36bn, EU28bn) a year.
By the end of 2006, each campus is expected to have over 700 students following the same curriculum as in the UK with a similar emphasis on academic achievement and all-round development in culture and sports. The schools will be open only to people with foreign passports or Chinese with Hong Kong or Taiwan identity papers.
Later, though, Beijing is expected to relax regulations on joint venture schools, raising opportunities that Mr Able said Dulwich was looking into. For Dulwich, opening schools overseas has yielded an international reputation, a chance for pupil and staff exchanges and franchise income that would go toward providing more scholarships.
Four Chinese scholarship students will graduate from the London school this year. "One has been accepted by [US university] Stanford, another by Harvard. Another has been accepted by Cambridge [in the UK] and Harvard and will almost certainly choose Harvard. The other has been accepted by Cambridge and MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] and will probably choose MIT," Mr Able said.
Chinese families traditionally regard education as life's most important investment, often borrowing from banks, relatives and friends to send children on overseas study assignments that would have been out of reach only a decade ago. The UK, often seen as safer than the US, is the most popular destination for Chinese secondary school pupils. Fees at the Beijing and Shanghai campuses are not expected to be much lower than those in the UK, meaning that the parents of kindergarten children in the Shanghai campus are currently paying around Rmb7,000 to Rmb12,000 a month.
While Dulwich is to be paid a royalty per pupil, the investment in the Beijing and Shanghai schools is being raised by a variety of investors. The Shanghai campus is expected to cost around $10m, put up by Global Education Information Consulting Co, a foreign owned investment company based in Shanghai, and Saha Union, a Thai conglomerate run by Anand Panyarachun, a former prime minister and Dulwich College alumnus.
Dulwich is not the only UK private school trying to tap Asia's booming education market. Shrewsbury is involved in a school in Bangkok to rival one that Harrow opened there in 1998. Dulwich itself has run a school on the Thai island of Phuket for the past seven years. |
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