Young students at Shanghai Community International School. Photos: IC

By Jiang Wangjuan

With the number of foreigners moving to China on the increase, many new families are faced with important decisions about their children's education, whether to opt for local schooling or choose an expensive international school.

By the end of last year, China had 102 officially-recognized international schools, according to the Ministry of Education, but the costs are often prohibitive.

Money matters

"I can only really afford local kindergartens," Ricky Hay, a British father living in Beijing with two daughters, 2 and 4, told the Global Times. "International schools cost 10 times the price of local ones and are only affordable to top foreign executives or if an employer is paying the fees."

An English teacher who arrived in China four years ago, Hay pays 1,200 yuan ($168) a month for his youngest daughter to attend a local school and 3,000 yuan ($442) a month for his eldest to attend a bilingual Chinese school. They are the only foreign students in their class.

"A true international school would be over 10,000 yuan ($1,472) for each child a month, which is impossible for me to pay," Hay explained.

Naomi Saunders from Yew Chung International School of Beijing, which has 670 foreign students, told the Global Times that annual tuition fees for primary and secondary school range from 157,000 yuan ($23,116) to 185,000 yuan ($27,238) and that most students have parents working in foreign companies or embassies whose salary packages cover education expenses.

Working as an actor and singer in China, 34-year-old Nabil Huening from Chicago said that having three children and one adopted baby makes it far too costly to send them all to international schools.

"International schools are good but too expensive to be worthy. It will cost 150,000 yuan ($22,085) a year for each child," Huening told the Global Times.

"I've seen education in the US. It is better than that in the international school here and it is free. With this in mind, I feel it is unfair to pay extremely high prices here."

Living in China for over 10 years with his South Korean wife, Huening has enrolled his three older children, 10, 8 and 6, at local Chinese schools in Beijing. He pays 4,000 yuan ($589) for each child each semester, which is 10 times the price that Chinese children have to pay, but still cheaper than international schools.

Cultural benefits

For some parents, immersing their children in local culture also sways their education choices.

"If the kids want to learn Chinese, they can't, at least at the very beginning, go to an international school," said Chinese-American mother Liu Xiaonan, whose two daughters attended local schools when the family moved to China eight years ago.

Liu, who met and married her American husband in the US, believes that the new generation, especially mixed children like her daughters, should be fully bicultural and bilingual. She said that was part of the reason why the whole family moved here and while it was seen as a big risk at the time, she is now happy with her decision.

Her older daughter Meilin Gray, 21, is now a senior student at Tianjin Normal University. She is also an aspiring pop singer and sang the theme song for the Mandarin version of Beauty and the Beast with Hong Kong singer Nicolas Tse.

Gray said that although studying at a Chinese school for eight years was hard work, especially for the first three years when she had to carry a dictionary with her and stay up late for homework, she never wanted to go to an international school.

"There is no point to stay in another country and pretend you are not there," she told the Global Times. "My family is here and my best friends are all local Chinese."

International aspirations

Despite the success of local education for Meilin, who came to China at 13, Liu decided to transfer her younger daughter Sulin, who arrived when she was only 5 and spent six years at a Chinese school, to an international school.

"She was more like a Chinese after primary school," Liu said. "She could speak English but she needed to go to international school to learn to read and write."

British father Hay, who said that he plans to return to UK where the schools are free when his children grow older, has similar concerns.

He is worried that Chinese schools cannot provide the English necessary for his kids and that they may have problems back home in the future and in their further education.

"Even at bilingual schools which provide good foreign teachers, if the other kids are all Chinese, then the English level has to be low enough for the majority to understand," Hay said, adding that he has found both his kids to be "really" slow in English, especially his eldest.

For parents who plan to stay in China for a long time, Huening said that sending children to study at an international school is the best option and will be his ultimate choice when his children get older. Although paying for four to attend an international school seems ridiculous for him and his family at the moment, he said that in the future, it will be inevitable.

"The standard of international schools is that of the colleges in the West. As parents, we have to prepare them for the future," Huening said.

"The children will continue learning Chinese and Chinese culture because the school is in China. Only at an international school will the children learn to open up and communicate with people from all over the world."

German mother Sonja Li enrolled her children, now 3 and 5, at the International Montessori School of Beijing as soon as she could.

"The Chinese educational system is something totally different from that in the West," Li told the Global Times. "It has too much pressure on the children and doesn't inspire them to think."

"I want them to stay open, have fun and keep up with other kids when they are young," she added. "Hours of homework at night does no good."

Speaking basic Chinese, but unable to read and write Chinese characters, Li also feels she would be helpless in helping her children with their education and schoolwork in China if they reached a higher level and were enrolled at a local Chinese school.

"As a mother, I don't want to see them lag behind," she said.