Students make faces in front of camera at a boarding school in Zhengzhou, Henan Province on November 10. Photo: CFP

Some students at boarding schools in rural areas suffer from malnutrition and mental health problems due to the poor conditions at these schools, a Beijing-based NGO dedicated to education reform in China, revealed in its latest survey.

Growing Home, an NGO dedicated to protecting the rights of students, said that students at boarding schools in the countryside are shorter and weigh less than other children their age in China.

Students at boarding schools in rural areas are up to 10 centimeters shorter and 9 kilograms lighter on average than students elsewhere, the survey revealed.

In developed countries, boarding schools are normally for the children of the rich. But in China, rural boarding schools cater to the children of migrant workers who have moved to cities to find work and left their children behind. Students have to live in dormitories in poor conditions, away from their parents for long periods of time.

"We have long been worried that collective campus life might have some impact on students' health, considering the limited educational resources in rural areas and the lack of teaching staff, so we did the survey," Mei Dong, deputy director of Beijing Growing Home, told the Global Times.

The NGO surveyed over 30,000 students at 100 rural boarding schools in 10 provinces including Hebei, Sichuan, Hunan and Yunnan, from January 2012 to November 2014. The NGO found that many students were suffering from problems related to nutrition and mental health caused by their living conditions and the distribution of educational resources.

Poor academic performance 

China's education authorities implemented a policy that ordered the closure and merging of rural schools, making the children of migrant workers go to schools in towns and cities far from their homes, between 2001 and 2012. The policy aimed to use education resources more efficiently and improve the quality of education.

Statistics from the Ministry of Education show that 370,000 schools were closed in that period, most of which were primary and middle schools in the countryside. Now, 32.76 million children attend rural boarding schools, Growing Home said, including 11 million primary school students. Three-fifths of the boarding school students' parents work in cities.

The survey revealed that due to the limited number of teaching staff, students are regularly left in classrooms for a long time on their own and have little access to extracurricular activities.

According to the survey, 63.8 percent of the surveyed students said they felt lonely, 17.6 percent suffered from depression and 8.4 percent had thoughts about suicide.

"Students in boarding schools often feel lonely and insecure. Most of them are afraid of the dark and inclined to be more emotional," Mei said.

Back in 2012, when Mei was visiting a boarding school in Northwest China's Gansu Province, he found that a lot of students began to cry after the lights went out in their dormitories. "They felt unsafe, and were emotionally unstable," Mei said.

Another survey carried out by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in 2002 found that the 2,000 rural boarding school students surveyed displayed higher levels of anxiety and poorer social skills than their peers.

Growing Home also found that the students often had to live in crowded, foul-smelling dormitories, with many students sharing beds.

The children in many of the schools surveyed only ate meat once every two or three days and in many instances the children's diets were primarily composed of processed junk food.

Living conditions vary according to the schools' economic situation. Normally, there are no private shower rooms in the dormitories and in the worst schools. Dozens of students huddle in a 60-square-meter room.

"Students have no privacy while living in these cramped spaces. Plus, there are cases where younger students were bullied by older boys in the dormitory," Mei said.

Due to a shortage of teaching staff, there are only one or two teachers who take care of the students. "They cannot even take care of the students' daily life, an certainly not their psychological needs," Mei said.

A far from impressive policy

China created these rural boarding schools in a bid to improve the education available to poor children but the results of the policy have been far from impressive.

"The consequences of the school closures and mergers are obvious. Students in the boarding schools are found to be less competitive than those at non-boarding schools," Xiong Bingqi, a professor of education issues at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, told the Global Times.

Boarding school students' academic performances are worse on average than students at other kinds of schools, Xiong added.

The declining number of students from rural areas going to colleges and universities has become worrying, according to a blue-book on China's education development issued by CASS in 2010. The decline is linked to the closure of rural schools, which resulted in a rising drop-out rate among rural students and increasing education costs.

Due to the closure of schools in villages, many students who do not attend boarding schools have to travel long distances every day to schools in towns or cities.

In 2012, the State Council urged local authorities to stop the closure and merger of village schools, but local authorities have taken no remedial measures to respond to the State Council's statement.

In fact, Mei said, an increasing number of rural boarding schools are under construction. "For local authorities, it remains easier to pursue these policies than to improve the quality of schools," Mei said.

The establishment of these schools has also had safety consequences. As children have to travel further to go to school, they often ride in unsafe buses.

School bus accidents are not uncommon as due to limited resources, many school buses are overcrowded.

There were at least 43 school bus accidents nationwide from 2010 to 2014, leading to 153 deaths,  reported Beijing-based newspaper The Mirror.

"The central government should rethink this policy and allocate more teaching staff and resources to the boarding schools," Xiong said.

Local authorities should reopen some of the non-boarding schools in villages to offer a good learning environment for those students, he added.