Internationalising education: travels in Inner Mongolia

A scoping trip for the VCE in China

Last week, Ms Morris, Mr Murphy and Dr Yali Shao returned from a very fast trip to two outstanding schools in China, to continue discussions about offering VCE in China. Parents would recall that last year, NHS celebrated being the only Australian government school to be granted a licence to deliver the VCE in China.

The two schools were Baotou Foreign Languages Schools and Hengshui No1 High School. 

Baotou FLS is a school of 3000 and Inner Mongolia’s only Foreign Languages School. Because of the presence of Australian companies there - working in the steel and construction industry - Australian education ranks extremely highly. Indeed, the taxi driver driving the party from the airport waxed lyrically about the importance of Australia and an Australian education! Hengshui No 1 High School is a very famous Chinese school of 12,000 about three hours south of Beijing. Amazingly resourced (the Chinese Olympic swimming team practice in its pool) it already has 300 students in its International Centre intending to undertake tertiary study in the US, Britain and Australia, but so far, without the benefit of the VCE. It snowed while the group travelled and every single flight was delayed.

Stay tuned for further details.