K12

British boarding schools secure chartered flights to bring back Chinese students

British boarding schools are chartering flights from China this month to ensure international pupils can return, underscoring the private sector’s reliance on income from lucrative foreign students.

The Boarding Schools’ Association, which represents more than 500 schools across the UK, has worked with a Chinese airline to secure flights for pupils from China on certain dates in August, iNews reported.

The outlet cited a statement by Robin Fletcher, chief executive of the BSA, who said: “BSA has been co-ordinating flights to support the safe return of boarding students from China to the UK.” The Chinese School Dubai, mainly focused on catering to the Chinese community in the emirate, will open in Mirdif in September, The Khaleej Times reported.

The school will initially offer classes up to Grade 5 and operate on a non-profit basis. When fully operational it will add 2,000 places to Dubai’s private education sector.

Students will learn an enriched School districts in California are at odds with one another over plans to reopen in September, while the federal government continues to demand that all US schools resume in-person teaching or risk losing funding.

California’s two largest school districts, Los Angeles and San Diego, said that classes will remain online-only throughout the autumn term, as the state continued to grapple with rising numbers of Covid-19 cases.

There are more than 16,000 students from China and Hong Kong at schools that are members of the Independent Schools Council, Chinese national curriculum, and will be offered Arabic as second language, Islamic studies, moral education and UAE studies based on the UAE national curriculum.

The school will admit Chinese and foreign students.

Dr Abdulla Al Karam, chairman of the board of directors and director general of the Knowledge and Human Development Authority,

“There’s a public health imperative to keep schools from becoming a petri dish,” said Austin Beutner, the school superintendent in Los Angeles, whose county is home to more than a third of the state’s coronavirus cases.

Decisions on reopening schools in the US are made at the local level.

This has resulted in a patchwork of plans, the latest thread in which is expected to come when Orange County, another Californian state in which resistance to mandatory mask-wearing orders is reportedly

meaning China sends more pupils to UK private schools than any other country.

Boarding schools are said to be said: “China and the UAE have had a close long-standing friendship, and there’s no better symbol for that friendship than a school. The Chinese School Dubai will be the heart of the Chinese community in Dubai and foster a rich exchange of teaching and learning opportunities with other schools in Dubai.

“We are honoured that the first Chinese-curriculum school widespread, recommends that schools resume face-to-face instruction.

Meanwhile, at the state level, US education secretary Betsy DeVos has reiterated the Trump administration’s push to re-open schools fully in September and repeated the government’s threat to withdraw funding from schools that do not comply.

In an interview with CNN, DeVos said “the rule should be that kids go back to school this fall”, adding taking a range of measure to ensure the arrival of Chinese students is smooth and safe.

These include sending staff to meet pupils at airports, assisting with travel to schools, and providing quarantining facilities if coming from countries where 14 days’ self-isolation is required upon arrival, iNews reported.

The move to enable Chinese students to resume studies in the UK in the autumn comes at a time of geopolitical tensions between the two countries following Boris Johnson’s government’s decision to strip Huawei from Britain’s 5G

First Chinese private school to open in Dubai

network. outside of China is opening in Dubai. We look forward to the new possibilities and connections this will bring to our education community.”

The school is the first overseas Chinese school to receive financial support from the Chinese government. Its teachers are recruited by the Hangzhou

US: Californian districts take alternate stances on reopening schools as Trump reiterates funding threat

Education Bureau. that any Covid-19 hotspots can be “dealt with on a school-by-school or a case-by-case basis”.

The US’s disjointed approach to school re-openings comes as the country struggles to quell Covid-19, which has infected nearly 3.5 million people and killed 138,000.

Much of the disagreement on how to get pupils back in classrooms stems from wider debate over the effectiveness of face coverings and masks at curbing the spread of the coronavirus.