An example of a privately-run school for migrant children: fieldwork conducted at Ming Yuan Elementary School

Like most migrant schools, Ming Yuan primary school is privately owned. It is run by the principal, Mr. Zhang, who came to Beijing in 1995 as a migrant worker himself. Ming Yuan elementary migrant school has four sites so far, located in different areas in Beijing, and a total (altogether) of around 3,000 migrant children on roll. The staffing mainly comes from retired teachers and students who have a degree from a teacher training college. The school is also one of the few migrant schools to have been officially inspected and approved by the Beijing Municipal Commission of Education. That was in 2003.

I visited the school in March 2011. The first, most striking impression came from its location and the run-down environment it is in. The school was difficult to find, located as it is among twisting and dirty alleys north of the Fifth Ring Road in the Hai Dian district in Beijing. A rusty metal entrance gate was locked from the inside with a padlock and chain. It opened onto a small, mud-cracked play area

248 _Ibid.

249 _{‘No One Should Left Behind?’ <http://news.ifeng.com/mainland/special/bjdagongzidixuexiao/>} accessed 28 February 2012

250

This sub-section discusses several findings made through actual visits, on 2 March 2011, and in an interview conducted with Zhang Gezhen, Principal of Ming Yuan Migrant School in Beijing. Therefore references are not provided at each point.

approximately 300 square metres in size. It had two ping-pong tables and a few parking lots. Behind this was a plain three-storey brick building almost derelict in appearance save for a painted slogan quoting the former party leader Deng Xiaoping:251 ‘the aim of education is towards modernisation, the world and the future’. To one side of the school building was a dirty semi-open toilet with no flush and only a brick partition to divide the sexes. The washing facilities had no private cubicles. On the other side was a heap of coal to fuel radiators providing heating for the students and teachers in winter. The interior of the building was very dingy. It contained some ten to fifteen classrooms, with crumbling walls, a few old desks, barely any books and no hint of decoration or display of children’s work. Some classrooms were so full of dirt, students could hardly see or breathe properly: plaster fell from the ceiling whenever someone moved upstairs. Lighting, ventilation and heating systems were in very poor condition. There were no fire exits. Drinking water was not available and there was no First Aid room. The school did not have a library. Such poor surroundings and such lack of basic facilities must have a negative impact on the physical, psychological and academic development of the migrant children who attend. By contrast, most state and private schools in the country have well-equipped school facilities, including a First Aid Room, a playground, a recreation centre, educational facilities, multimedia teaching and disabled access.

When interviewed, Principal Zhang described how the great influx of internal migrant children into the city, with no local hukou, had happened in just the last fifteen years. There are approximately twenty million migrant children in China, and most of the migrant families prefer to live in more economically developed cities. Most of the students in his schools greatly prefer living and studying in Beijing to life in the villages they came from. Even though conditions for living and studying are crowded and poor, it is still better being with parents in the cities than living under the ineffective watch of grandparents or their relatives and studying in rural schools with a relatively poor quality of education. With all the new arrivals, places in state elementary and junior high schools have become very tight. The emergence of migrant schools has gradually filled the gap in compulsory education for migrant children. By 2011 there were 268 migrant schools in Beijing in total: most had not been sanctioned

251 _{Deng Xiaoping was the leader of the Community Party of China. He promoted the development of a} market economy and presided over the opening up of China to the rest of the world.

by the local department of education, only 63 receiving an official approval. Just one of his own sites in Beijing was granted authorisation to operate legally.252

Principal Zhang pointed out some of his present concerns:

The first concern is the problem of operating funds for compulsory education. Since Ming Yuan School was established in 1995, scholars, the representatives of the National Peoples’ Congress and the mass media have constantly appealed for a guaranteed mechanism to ensure operating funds for compulsory education. This has never been fully implemented by the local department of education. According to the Constitution of China and the Compulsory Education Law of China, compulsory education should be a duty of the state. For migrant children, when they migrate from one place to another, the public funds for compulsory education should be allotted accordingly. Nevertheless, most exodus communities are from less economically developed regions so that they have already faced obstacles in securing funds for themselves in the region. Hence it can be difficult to transfer the funds from exodus regions to urban cities as receiving regions which are more economically developed in practice. The local governments of receiving areas may consider that the main responsibility for them is to ensure the rights of local children to receive education; migrant children are really out of its jurisdiction. So the problem is that duties and responsibilities between exodus cities and receiving cities have not been clarified.

In addition to the challenge of securing funds for compulsory education, Principal Zhang gave an example from the city of Shanghai to illustrate current progress made by the Shanghai local authorities who are trying to improve the access opportunities of migrant children in the city. There are 248 migrant schools in Shanghai. In September 2008 the Shanghai government signed contracts with 55 migrant schools to ‘purchase’ education services from them. In other words, he explained, because of limited public education resources in state schools, migrant schools were ‘paid’ by the Shanghai government to provide education for local migrant children. As migrant parents have greatly contributed to the development of Shanghai, the city government has taken it as a duty to provide equal opportunities for migrant children in their access to education. Migrant children are granted 3,000 RMB (equivalent to £300) per academic year by the government of Shanghai and the rest of the children’s expenses are subsidised by the local departments of education in different districts. Under this new mechanism, migrant children do not have to pay any ‘indirect fees’; they are exempt from temporary schooling fees and other miscellaneous charges. The aim of the Shanghai

252 _{The site I visited was not approved by the local department of education in Beijing. The school} facilities are quite poor.

government is to sign similar contacts with the remaining migrant schools in the city by the end of 2011.

By contrast, the Principal emphasised, distribution of funds for compulsory education in Beijing is not at all ideal. The total investment from the Beijing government for each child at an elementary state school is around 11,000 RMB (equivalent to £1,100) per academic year, while migrant schools, including Ming Yuan migrant school, normally charge around 300 RMB (equivalent to £30) per academic term. Compared with the total investment made on urban children, the investment on each migrant child in Beijing would be less than 2,000 RMB (equivalent to £200) per year. Obviously the quality of education can only be poor in migrant schools and migrant children are marginalised, on the edge of the city. As a consequence, those who try to run migrant schools can only afford to rent small places with very poor facilities.

Another main concern of Principal Zhang is that migrant teachers do not have entitlement to welfare rights. Though around 10,000 teachers in the Beijing migrant schools devote themselves to teaching some 200,000 migrant children ‘under the same blue sky’ as the more privileged, their average wages are barely above the minimum wage, owing to the financial circumstances most of these schools are in. (This makes it difficult to hire and retain competent teachers.) But, in addition to receiving such low wages, the Principal points out, migrant teachers are unable to enjoy benefits offered to teachers in state schools, including the Five Social Insurance Schemes,253 training for further career development and, most importantly, professional evaluation.

Another problem that troubles Principal Zhang is the one already explained – that the majority of migrant children are unable to take the high school entrance exam in the city because they have not obtained a local hukou. Because of this, many children are sent back to their home towns to continue their education. Zhang emphasises that these children, who have lived in the city for so many years, then feel they are neither rural nor urban. It will be too late to give them more education once

253 _{The Social Security Scheme (also known as the Five Social Insurance Schemes) refers to old age} insurance, medical insurance, unemployment insurance, work injury insurance and maternity insurance in China. Migrant workers and migrant teachers are not covered by the Five Social Insurance Schemes. ‘China’s Social Security and Its Policy’

they have grown up as adults. Not educated properly and greatly reliant on the facilities of the city, they could become a serious social problem for the country.

In recent years, the leaders of China have emphasised the importance of improving opportunities for migrant children to access education. In 2003 Premier Wen Jiabao wrote his famous slogan ‘Growing up and progressing together under the same blue sky’ during his visit to a migrant school in Beijing. President Hu Jingtao too visited a migrant school in the Haidian District in Beijing in 2010, stating that the Beijing government must improve and provide an equal educational opportunity to migrant children. But, despite such high expectations from the top leaders, implementation is, in practice, still unrealised. The issue of migrant children is still a very grave one from Principal Zhang’s perspective.

3.3.3 An example of a state school for migrant children: fieldwork