British boarding schools are estimated to have missed out on hundreds of lucrative Chinese boarders after the home office stopped issuing visas to students across a swathe of southern China. The clampdown began in September after the UK Border Agency found a number of irregularities with applications from Fuzhou province.
The home office refused to confirm what these were, but it is understood that there was a spike in applications sparked by a rush by farm workers trying to get into the UK by posing as English-language students. Boarding schools have been affected by the clampdown, which saw visas stopped at a centre in Fuzhou as well as at visa offices in Guangzhou and Shenzhen in neighbouring Guangdong province.
But in November, the UK Border Agency said it would accept new applications from students in the three provinces set to attend fee-levying independent schools. However Martin Webber, managing director of Academic Asia International, which recruits Chinese students for UK boarding schools, says the damage has been done. “British boarding schools have come to depend heavily on Chinese students in recent years and many schools have invested heavily in marketing and promotion in the area,” he says.
He now expects the Chinese boarders hit by the clampdown to have gone elsewhere, such as the US and Australia. “It has scarred a lot of people. The message we fear that has come across is that ‘you can’t ever be sure with the UK any more’. Some parents might think that to be on the safe side they will send their children to the US instead. The UK is competing with the US and Australia here and it is the long-term impact we are concerned about,” says Webber.
Hilary Moriarty, national director of the Boarding Schools Association, plays down the number of schools affected. “Last year we had just over 1,300 coming to boarding schools from China. If this had affected the whole country, then it would be more serious,” she says.
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)