Wealth Blog | Nearly a third of China’s super-rich favour British schools

Last week’s Hurun Report, which tracks the changing foibles and fads of the seriously rich in China, tells us not only their preferences in luxury shopping and travel destinations, but other things besides. Top of the list of bizarre objectives is sending their kids to expensive elite boarding schools in Britain.
 

Pity the kids

Following on from yesterday’s blog on the subject, I can only assume that mainland parents believe the glossy brochures where the sun shines and don’t bother to go over and visit the schools in person. If they did, they would see that unless a Chinese kid’s English is brilliant, they are going to be put in a form a year or more below their age group to compensate. They face an uphill struggle: lonely and speaking a foreign language, stuck in a class with younger kids and cut off from peers their own age. On the other hand, isolation is probably a good incentive to learn English fast. In some schools, such as Queens in Taunton, Somerset, they have special houses for Chinese pupils, where English is taught as a second language to bring them up to speed. With several Chinese kids together, they will at least have kindred spirits. But if they just hang out together speaking Chinese they learn little English.
 

Poor mixers

Chinese kids tend, from my observation, not to assimilate well in pool of precocious privileged British kids. But why would they? Would a little English Lord Fauntleroy do well parachuted into a snooty school in Beijing? It’s sink or swim but it must be a nightmare of cold and loneliness for many Chinese kids.  
 

Overseas education is hip