Three British-based teachers, Jun Yang-Williams, Oliver Beach and Kris Boulton, all of them TES writers, recently travelled to China to deliver a course of teacher training and learn from good practices in Chinese schools 

What they found might be considered surprising:

Children can be autonomous, and often are not shepherded

At the school where we delivered teacher training we found children hanging out, chatting, playing table tennis. When the bell rings, and a steady flood of teenagers makes its way to the classrooms, it’s noisy, uncontrolled, and once at their desks the chatting continues and some even have their phones out. There isn’t a teacher in sight.

In each room a pupil has stepped up to the blackboard at the front and begun to write a list of topics. A young woman is now walking past the rooms, unmistakably a teacher, dressed in a traditional black gown. We ask her what’s happening. The pupils all have self-directed study for two hours a day, she explains. Every day?  Every day. 

At lunch the next day we have the chance to speak with one of the pupils we saw the night before. They are iGCSE students aspiring to study at British or American universities. We ask him how it’s going. His outlook is positive. He likes history and, though he finds the course a bit too easy, he’s nevertheless concerned that he might not be working hard enough.

‘Childhood’ is a relatively recent, and arguably unwelcome, invention in the West

The idea that we each have a right to a period in our early lives that is ours to enjoy is unquestionably preferable to a world in which we might be expected to work in the mines from the age of four. How extreme have we become, though? “Childhood” was also supposed to be a time of learning, a time of readying ourselves so we might fulfil our later obligations to society. To what extent has it instead become an entitlement which we secretly hope will last forever?  While one “extreme” has students in China worried that working until 8.30pm is not enough, another has students in the UK yelling “You’re ruining my life!” at the suggestion of six hours work a day during the Easter holidays.

The Chinese students we met had their friends, and fashions, and smartphones, and their versions of Twitter, WhatsApp, and Snapchat, yet they were equally able to put all that aside when needed, think about their future, and get to work. 

Education has become a family business in Chinese culture

Not only do Chinese parents get involved in their children’s education, but they also take responsibility for their children’s academic success. They believe that they have the obligation and responsibility to help build their children’s success in education. They take their children’s academic failure as their own failure, as they feel they have not done enough to work with teachers and their children. Children’s achievements equate to parents’ achievements.

(This attitude also contributes to how Chinese students stand out as a high-achieving ethnic minority group within the British educational context, despite all the challenges relating to language and culture faced by them.)

The subject knowledge of the teachers is extraordinary

The less experienced in the group we trained expressed the naive frustration that their students couldn’t immediately apprehend their own ultra-high level abstract appreciation of the subject content, just as we see in trainee teachers here. The teachers we worked with were deeply passionate about wanting to inspire their children, and share with them their own love for the subjects they teach. There was anxiety that the need to cover course content, and the pressure of terminal exams, meant teachers didn’t have the time to work at the slower pace they might like. Students would fail to understand, and then fail to remember, just as ours do. And it turns out that even Chinese students will ask, “Can we have a fun lesson today?”

Our interaction with the Chinese education system was brief, and narrow. Undoubtedly there is a great deal more for us to learn. At this point, the biggest question left unanswered is to what extent the success of Chinese students in the popular imagination of the British is a result of the distorting effects of Shanghai’s individual listing in the Programme for International Student Assessment tables?

Another question is to what extent is the success of Chinese students due to their incredible work ethic, and to what extent is it due to their schools and teachers? 

It feels somewhat obvious to opine about what us Brits can do to achieve the same level of success as our Chinese counterparts, and we do see that narrative pop up on blogs, in books and in conferences around the country. However, the multi-faceted culture that creates the success is based on entrenched values that have remained through decades.

We have a lot to learn from China but we wonder if attempting to mimic it would really produce the gains and the students that we want to be successful in modern Britain.

Jun Yang-Williams teaches in England and was a star of BBC Two’s Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School

Kris Boulton is a maths teacher at an inner-London school and blogs here

Oliver Beach is an inner-London economics teacher, former Teach First graduate and star of BBC series Tough Young Teachers. He tweets as @olivermbeach

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