In July 2021, the Chinese government banned after-school private tutoring for primary and middle school students in a bid to reduce the academic burden and promote social equality.
Known as the double reduction policy, it forced curriculum tutoring companies to register as non-profits and put a limit on the amount of homework that could be given out by teachers.
However, with China’s hyper-competitive educational system, parents are still desperate to give their kids the best chance at succeeding in life. So the ban has effectively pushed the industry underground as parents pay high fees for private sessions.
It has also forced education companies to look for alternative income streams, which has included turning to the international online education market.
“Being able to access good quality programs from the mainland via social media might be an attractive option for both families in the diaspora and for the firms whose business model has been undercut,” said Professor Emeritus Anthony Welch, who specialises in national and international education policy at the University of Sydney.
TAL Education Group is one of the Chinese off-campus tutoring companies whose stock prices plummeted after the introduction of the double reduction policy, and the company said it sees significant potential in its overseas learning business, Think Academy.
In Australia, Think Academy offers online maths classes for students from year 1 to year 8 and communicates with parents via WeChat.
In a statement to SBS, the company said its business in Australia was still at an early stage, and could not provide information about what syllabus is taught to Australian students.
How big was China’s tutoring industry?
Private tutoring in China took off in the early 1990s and quickly grew into an industry worth $180 billion to $425 billion by various estimates.
Professor Welch said Chinese society has long centred around a “test culture” where a “poor score will condemn you to a very limited future”.
Chinese students face two major exams in their lives. The first, known as Zhongkao, is taken at the age of 15 with the results deciding whether that student goes to a regular high school or a vocational one that teaches trades.
Students that attend regular high schools will then take three years to prepare for the College Entrance Examination, known as Gaokao. If their exam score is too low they won’t get into university.
“As we know Chinese kids get exceptional [test] results … but it is at a major cost,” Professor Welch said.
“Not just financial but emotional and psychological, the children, their families, the teachers. It’s a hell of a lot of pressure.”
Private tutoring companies had used the competitiveness of Chinese society to turn major profits for years.
But when the double reduction policy was introduced, the stock prices of US-listed Chinese education companies plummeted, and are yet to bounce back.
The graph shows how much the stock prices of Chinese private education companies plummeted after the introduction of the double reduction policy in July 2021. Credit: SBS Dateline
Peer pressure drives the tutoring sector in Australia
According to Mohan Dhall, CEO of the Australian Tutoring Association, one in seven Australian children attend private tutoring at some point in their school life. He says in areas around selective schools the rate increases to as high as one in two.
Sally (not her real name) was dissatisfied with the Mandarin language classes her son was being offered in his Sydney kindergarten. Having spoken her native language with her son at home since he was a baby, she realised his language abilities were well beyond what the class could offer.
She decided to look offshore.
“I don’t think school language offerings are evolving the same way that Australia is evolving,” she said.
Sally moved to Australia from China and has raised her children here. She wants them to speak fluent Mandarin to communicate with their grandparents and because “it’s a part of their heritage”.
She has since enrolled both her sons, now aged 7 and 10, into online classes run by a New Zealand-based company called WuKong that offers maths and language classes run by Chinese teachers. She says their classes are more advanced than what she found offered in Australia.
Associate Professor Christina Ho, from the University of Technology Sydney, has spent much of her career researching Asian migrants and the Australian education system.
She says migrant families have been known to use tutoring to push their students to excel rather than just to “catch up”. She says that attitude is expanding due to what she describes as “peer pressure”.
Associate Professor Christina Ho said it’s a move an increasing amount of families are taking after the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the potential of remote online learning.
“If everyone you know is using it then you can’t be the only one not using it,” she said.
When tutoring makes learning harder
While Associate Professor Ho says many families may prefer to use native speakers to teach their children languages, the use of offshore tutors for other subjects such as maths could make learning more difficult.
She says international tutors often teach subjects differently from how things are taught in the Australian syllabus.
“I think a lot of students probably would struggle with having to sit in a classroom in Australia dealing with the Australian curriculum and then if they're being told to do maths in a different way I imagine that would be quite confusing for some people,” Associate Professor Ho said.
Classroom teachers are also having to navigate teaching a room full of students who have learned content elsewhere.
“Sometimes the teachers will say it’s quite hard to cater for everyone in their classroom when so many kids are going off and doing tutoring and maybe they’re a year ahead of other kids,” she said.
“It raises the question of where should you be learning this stuff.”
Mr Dhall believes the tutoring sector needs to be better regulated in Australia but he doesn’t believe bans work.
Instead, he says the sector needs to be regulated through a licencing model which protects children and ensures tutors meet Australian standards.
