Opinion | For China’s migrant children struggling to get into schools, policies may have changed but attitudes haven’t

Manos Antoninis says policy changes to ease entry barriers are necessary but not sufficient, with new research finding examples of schools and teachers themselves becoming the new gatekeepers, keeping alive the discrimination

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Migrant children learn about plants in a class on the environment. Even though Chinese law mandates all migrant children be given access to education, some schools impose additional requirements for them to enrol, in an effort to make access harder. Photo: JGI China

Published: 10:14am, 22 Nov 2018Updated: 7:22pm, 22 Nov 2018

Internal migration in China for work and better opportunities is commonly described as the biggest in human history. Unsurprisingly, this has had a significant effect on education.

Policies have shifted over time to reflect the changes on the ground, allowing all migrant children access to schools, but mindsets take longer to shift. What we learn from China is that discrimination in education cannot be eradicated overnight.

The scale of people moving around the country is unmatched elsewhere. In 2016, 77 million Chinese people had moved to find work in another province, while 93 million had moved within their province. As for the number of children, in 2012, there were an estimated 20 million migrants aged between six and 14. One in three children in rural areas are estimated to have been left behind as their parents moved.

But lessons can be learnt from the policies that China put in place – and then removed – to limit the movement of people in the country and how this has had an impact on education. Indeed, the lessons may resonate well in Hong Kong where the influx of mainland Chinese students is putting pressure on the school system.

China’s registration system, the hukou, was put in the place in the 1950s, classifying residents as rural or urban and linking access to services, including education, by their registered place of birth. In the early 2000s, more than half of migrant children in Beijing were attending unauthorised migrant schools that were considered of lower quality and lacking in qualified teachers and infrastructure. They were the lucky ones. Migrant children at that time were far less likely than their peers to go to school at all.