Op-Ed Contributors

In search of quality education for kids

By Fumiyo Layman (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-09 07:51

I moved with my husband and children to Beijing last summer and started looking for a pre-school/kindergarten for our two-year-old daughter. We did not consider local public schools. Yet I checked out some Chinese private pre-schools and kindergartens. Considering that the average annual income in Beijing is less than 50,000 yuan, I found the tuition to be quite high.

When it comes to international (English curriculum) schools in Beijing, they are three or four times more expensive than some private schools in Japan and the United States. One of my Chinese friends who sent her son to a major international kindergarten in Beijing's Shunyi district told me that she had calculated the daily tuition to be more than 1,000 yuan (equivalent to one month's tuition in public kindergartens). Nevertheless, she will send her two sons to the school for the next session too, because she believes it provides good education. Her comment is not surprising - even understandable.

But the reality is that very few parents can afford such extravagance. The lack of affordable public kindergartens makes it difficult for most children to have fair and equal access to quality education in China.

Public kindergarten tuition in Beijing is between a 500 and 1,000 yuan a month, whereas for private ones it is 3,000 to 6,000 yuan. Average-income Chinese parents cannot afford to admit their children to private kindergartens, because the fees can be 50-80 percent of their annual income. If they cannot afford such expensive schools, how can they get "quality" education for their children?

Japanese families face a similar problem and the policy trends in Japan give an idea of how China could tackle it.

According to a 2008 Monkasho (Japanese Ministry of Education) survey, Japan has more than 13,000 kindergartens, 40 percent of which are public and the rest private. But more than 80 percent of Japanese children go to private kindergartens, where the average annual expense (tuition, school lunch and after-school activities) for a child is 641,000 yen (49,000 yuan) compared to 230,000 yen (17,700 yuan) in public kindergartens. This disparity is similar to that in China.

Why do more Japanese parents send their children to private rather than public kindergartens despite the huge gap in tuition? Do they believe private schools provide higher quality education? Private kindergartens' curricula are indeed varied (English classes by native speakers, basic Japanese and arithmetic classes, sports activities as well as dedicated art and music programs). Private schools are able to maintain their "mission", and sufficient funding enables them to provide professional training and attract experienced teachers.

But another reason is that local governments in Japan give priority to children of lower-income (and single or disabled) parents in public kindergartens/nurseries. Usually tuition is fully (or in large part) subsidized by the local welfare office for parents with an annual income of below 1,000,000 yen (77,000 yuan).