Mini Mandarins
Should you send your child to Chinese school?
There are just two classrooms at Kensington Wade, a shiny new independent prep school opening in west London in September, and at a glance they look the same. Colourful charts cover the walls, storybooks line the shelves, the odd toy lies around. But look a little closer and a certain difference becomes clear.
“There isn’t a word of English in here,” the headmistress, Jo Wallace, says as we pause in one of them. It’s true – the charts contain only Chinese symbols, the books are in Mandarin, and laid out are traditional oriental fans, scrolls and artwork. Even the school’s world map, which might normally have Europe at its centre, instead gives Asia and the Pacific the limelight. “That’s what we mean by totally immersive learning,” Wallace says, “the children will switch as soon as they’re in here, and that’s how they’ll begin to think in two ways.”
Kensington Wade is the first of its kind in Western Europe: a dual language English-chinese prep school for children aged three to
11. Children of any background are welcome – encouraged, even – and no previous connection to the Far East is necessary, meaning the school is being presented as a modern alternative to the nearby Lycée Français Charles De Gaulle.
It comes with a bold promise: prospective parents are told that by the time their child leaves for secondary school, they will be entirely fluent in Mandarin Chinese, while at the same time receiving just as good an education as any pupil of a “normal” English language school. By instilling that bilingual mindset, it’s thought, students here will be better prepared for the rigours of 21st-century life than any in Britain. It sounds a heady goal, but following a proven model, everything at Kensington Wade will be split down the middle. There will be a British teacher and a Chinese teacher, and half of lessons, games and activities will be in English, the other half in Mandarin (hence the two classrooms). Even the food will aim for an even mix.
“We are still fine-tuning the timetables, but pupils will likely alternate lessons as much as possible between the languages,” says Wallace. “At this crucial age [three to five years], they pick things up so quickly that the system will feel natural straight away.”
Wallace, who left a junior school in Putney for this challenge, speaks no Mandarin herself and hadn’t even been to China before becoming involved. Her deputy and many of the administrative staff will also be native English speakers. Wallace’s team researched different methods around the world in devising a curriculum that draws on both education systems. In maths, for instance, pupils will follow the “Shanghai method”, where each lesson focuses on a single mathematical concept, going over it in great depth until every child has mastered it.
In many ways it is a surprise it’s taken so long for a bilingual Englishchinese school to open in Britain (there are more than 200 in the US).
George Osborne, as chancellor, announced a £10 million investment to ensure 5,000 British students were learning Mandarin by 2020, but uptake remains slow. In 2015, just over 3,000 students sat a Mandarin GCSE, compared to more than 150,000 French candidates and 50,000 for German. However, the philosophy of Kensington Wade is that children need to be started in Mandarin far earlier than GCSE level.
“In order to conduct business with China, it really is vital to be able to speak the language” says Prof Hugo de Burgh, Kensington Wade’s chairman and founder. “China is currently the leading trade partner for 124 nations. We want to prepare the next generation to make the most of that.”
Initially it was thought the school could be founded as a free-school initiative, but going independent became the only way of delivering the requisite immersive programme.
The result is a newly developed site shared with a free school. Fifteen pupils are already signed up for the autumn opening – the maximum will be
36 (two groups of 18) but class sizes are being kept small for the first year, and the eldest a new pupil can be is five. In competition with other independent schools, fees are set at £17,000 a year, which is certainly within reach of the target market.
“Prospective parents are a real mix. Most don’t know any Chinese themselves”, De Burgh says. “But what they share is a recognition of the importance of China in the next generation’s lives. They realise that children can learn languages best if they become immersed, rather than simply learning something as foreign.”
“It’s all very exciting and new at the moment,” Wallace says. “For a bit we’ll be exceptional (hopefully in every sense) but in a few years we don’t want to be unusual at all.”
‘Parents realise children learn languages best when immersed’