HARRIED British parents use CBeebies as a stand-in child minder, but in China the pre-school channel is set to become an integral part of children’s education.
The BBC’s commercial arm has struck a deal that could see a chain of CBeebies-branded English-language schools open across the world’s most populous nation.
Much-loved CBeebies characters such as Sarah and Duck, Numtums and Nina and the Neurons will be used to lure in learners at the new centres, which will initially be aimed at 3 to 6-year-olds.
The first schools will open in Shanghai, followed by Beijing, with a further push in mainland China and Hong Kong expected over the coming years. Popular Holdings, a Singaporean education company, will shoulder the cost of building the network of schools; BBC Worldwide will pocket fees from licensing its CBeebies characters and programmes.
The tie-up could be highly lucrative for BBC Worldwide, which sells the corporation’s programmes to TV stations across the globe.
Advertisement
The Chinese education market is in the middle of an unprecedented boom thanks to the expansion of the country’s middle class and rising disposable incomes. Chinese parents trebled their spending on education between 2002 and 2011, and it is forecast to go on soaring because of the perceived shortcomings of state schools.
“There is a widespread perception that the national school system is struggling to keep pace with China’s economic success. Ambitious parents with significant savings are happy to spend on education,” said the British Council in a recent study.
English tutoring is becoming a must-have for China’s 500m-strong middle class as proficiency in the language is seen as a necessity for securing a well-paid job. Spending on English classes is forecast to more than double to £5bn by 2015, compared with 2010, and British media companies are scrambling to grab a slice of this huge investment by Chinese households.
Pearson, owner of the Financial Times, has a large and growing chain of English language schools in China, which use stories from the newspaper as a learning tool. The number of students enrolling at its schools rose 48% to more than 1m in the first six months of this year, according to the company’s latest accounts.