Private schools are paying agents in China up to £10,000 for each pupil they send to the UK, amid fears that the practice is pricing the British middle class out of fee-paying education.
Many schools routinely scout for Chinese pupils. Experts said last week that using agents to ensure a supply of wealthy foreign parents had enabled schools to raise fees to a level many UK families could no longer afford.
Some overseas families say the fees demanded by agents — which can be as high as £150,000 — are damaging the reputation of private schools, many of which are registered as charities.
The average fee for independent schools is £15,191 a year for day pupils and £36,000 for boarders. Fees rose by 1.1 per cent this year and 4.1 per cent last year after above-inflation increases for most of the past two decades.
The number of Chinese children, some as young as eight, at top British schools and universities has soared. Last year there were more than 8,000 children from mainland China at independent schools and a further 5,000 from Hong Kong. British universities have more than 216,000 Chinese students, some of whom have come through UK private schools.
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Neil Roskilly, a vice-president of the Independent Schools Association, which represents 600 head teachers, said schools were using agents in China to find bright children whose families could afford a private education. “Once a child is enrolled at a British school, a fee of between 15 and 25 per cent of the first year’s school fees is commonly paid to the agent by the school.”
He added that there were also other arrangements. “The agent’s commission can be for three years or for the time the child is at the school. Agents in China will sometimes ring round private schools in the UK and see what the best commission rates they can get are.”
Some Chinese parents not only pay the agent for introducing them to a school but are charged extra for advice, English-language tuition, interpreting and translation. The total can be more than £150,000 for a single child.
Barnaby Lenon, the head of the Independent Schools Council, said many of the services offered were unnecessary, and advised families to apply directly to UK schools.
In the first public sign of discontent rippling through one of UK education’s biggest markets, Chinese mothers with children studying in Britain have formed a WhatsApp group to swap experiences. They say they have been charged tens of thousands of pounds for advice on which private schools to apply to as well as coaching for children to pass entrance tests. Some children are told they need hundreds of hours of English-language classes to succeed and are offered lessons in etiquette to help them fit in.
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The mothers want private schools to boycott the consultants and agents. A mother of a 12-year-old boy said: “British schools should not be enabling agents to take huge commissions from parents who do not know how the system works. Why do they allow student recruitment in China that is so excessively expensive? Some of these schools are registered as charities and yet they allow this behaviour and work with these agents.”
Among the companies the mothers have complained about is BE Education, set up by William Vanbergen, a former Eton schoolmate of Prince William. BE Education describes itself as the “market leader” in China and charges about £112,000 for its most expensive package, around three times Eton’s annual fee.
The firm, which Vanbergen runs with his wife Emma, holds regular online festivals for parents, attended by speakers from top private schools such as Sevenoaks, Caterham and others. It has also started operating an assessment centre for some private schools, and screening candidates. It does not charge schools a commission for finding pupils.
A mother who asked to remain anonymous said that BE Education asked her child to do an assessment, then said he needed hundreds of hours of English-language tuition costing more than £20,000. She was not convinced this was essential, but feared that if she turned it down her son might not get into the well-known schools whose names she had been given.
“However, I was [then] told the cost of applying through the consultancy service, which is extremely high,” she said. “They have different levels of British consultants charging from 100,000 yuan [about £11,000] at the lowest, up to 1,000,000 yuan.”
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Emma Vanbergen said that BE Education offered consultancy services ranging from 70,000 yuan for a local Chinese consultant to guide parents through the application process and oversee tuition and test preparation to 500,000 yuan, a service that would usually provide a consultant who is a former pupil of a UK private school. She confirmed that when she advised families the cost was a million yuan, but said she agreed to such work only rarely.
She added: “In normal times, our consultants also fly to the UK to accompany parents and children on school visits and interviews acting as guides and translators ... The Chinese consultant holds the family’s hand through the entire process. We are proud of our impressive track record of sending superb students to the most competitive boarding schools in the UK.”
Alan Smithers, professor of education at Buckingham University, said: “British middle-class parents who would value strongly a private education for their children are being squeezed out because of these strong efforts independent schools are making to recruit wealthy families from overseas.”
Last week the Chinese government launched a crackdown on private tutoring in the country, causing the value of some private education firms to tumble on the stock market.
