Independent British schools could soon be teaching more foreign students at overseas branches than domestically as falls in overseas student enrolments at onshore locations give way to growth at foreign centres, according to the UK’s Independent Schools Council (ISC) annual census.
The ISC’s 1,257 member schools saw non-UK enrolments at franchise campuses rise from 18,784 to 22,514 in the last year. The number of overseas campuses has also grown by just over a third to 39, almost doubling 2012’s total.
“Government hostility to international students does us no favours at all”
Many of these campuses are in Asia, including ten in China and others in Thailand, South Korea and Malaysia. A further 11 are located in the Middle East.
Domestic operators, however, have seen the total of non-British overseas students – those with parents living in another country – drop 5.8% to 24,391 compared to last year.
ISC maintains that this may be explained by new wording of the question on the census that monitors the number of foreign nationals with parents living within the UK.
However, Hilary Moriarty, National Director of the Boarding Schools’ Association, called the downward turn a “worrying trend”.
“It’s perhaps due to the number of British schools opening branches out in other countries and soaking up demand or perhaps due to the warmer welcome extended to international students in countries like the USA, Canada, Australia and now New Zealand, which has announced its intention to double the value of its international education by 2025,” she told The PIE News.
“Government hostility to international students does us no favours at all in the low risk high value world of independent education for children,” she contended.
Speaking with The Times Education Supplement, Barnaby Lenon, chairman of the ISC, confirmed that the rise in the numbers of pupils in ISC school branches abroad “is going to be quite dramatic and the numbers of pupils in our franchise schools will rapidly overtake overseas pupils being educated here”.
The breakdown for UK-based centre enrolments shows that Hong Kong and mainland China continued to yield the most students, accounting for a combined share of 37.2% of all overseas pupils.
