Haileybury International School

Not to be confused with Haileybury and Imperial Service College.

Haileybury International School front gate

Haileybury International School (known internally as HIST) is a private boarding school one mile from Taitou near Tianjin.

Campus

Public and semi-public spaces of different sizes are scattered around the school campus in what the school describes as a "relaxed and comfortable environment". The school offers Chinese children with an education of questionable quality for an extortionate price.

Fees

Tuition fees are around 195,000 Chinese yuan per year for students in International Senior School, making it the most expensive private school in the area. Students pay additional fees for boarding, food, uniform, books and other minor expenses. With the average annual income of residents of Wuqing District being only 20,000 Chinese yuan per year, the school's tuition fees are around 10 times the local average salary.

No scholarships are currently available at the school.

Teachers

There are approximately 85 teachers at the school including 30 full-time expatriate teachers, 55 full-time bilingual teachers of Chinese nationality, 14 of whom hold degrees from universities outside of China. Thirty-six teachers master's and doctoral degrees, accounting for 42% of all teaching staff employed. The student-to-teacher ratio is usually around 8:1.

Expatriate teachers have reported struggles with a "toxic work environment", "oppressive management" and "endemic, large-scale corrupt practices" that keep staff morale at persistently low levels. Self-medication with drugs and alcohol are common among expatriate staff, sometimes during work hours. The school has a very high staff turnover rate.

Students

There are 850 students enrolled at the school but only around 600 are legally registered in China. Almost all of the students are of Chinese nationality and speak Chinese as a first language. Ninety-seven percent of the students board at the school's dormitory during weekdays. Typically, around 20% of the students board each weekend for an additional fee.

Curriculum

The school follows the Chinese national curriculum in years 1 through to 9, and the Victorian Certificate of Education in years 11 and 12. Year 10 students follow no country's national curriculum; rather, their curriculum and lessons are designed by HIST teachers themselves.

Books

The school circumvents Chinese import restrictions by printing its own pirated textbooks worth A$100,000 per year. These textbooks are of poor quality, mostly black-and-white, and are printed on paper that's much thicker than genuine books supplied by the publisher. Some of the books have been discarded because their pages were missing or upside-down. These pirated textbooks, which cost around A$3 each to produce, are sold to HIST students at prices higher than those of the genuine equivalents (A$80-100).

From iPads to iPhones in Senior School

From the school's founding in 2013 until mid-2018, all senior school students were provided with iPads to use as learning tools. When teachers raised the alarm about gaming addiction in senior school boys, senior school management stopped issuing iPads to new year 10 students and supported using iPhones instead because they are "smaller, quicker to charge and less conducive to gaming addiction". While some teachers supported the move, critics claimed iPhones were "nearly useless" as a learning tool and were an "easily concealable distraction" in the classroom.

Controversy

Two teachers formerly employed by Haileybury College brought a lawsuit against it in 2016 for various claims, including physical assault and deception of a VCE auditor. Other expatriate staff members who terminated employment abruptly under suspicious circumstances have made allegations that corruption, fraud, sexual harassment, physical assault, discriminatory practices, negligence, widespread piracy and deception of Chinese and Australian authorities was continued until at least mid-2018.

A financial audit conducted by the parent company BCL in late 2018 revealed that at least A$1.7 million had been misappropriated from the school's human resources budget, most likely into private accounts held by senior management, local governmentent officials and members of the school's board of directors. Several staff members, including some in senior leadership, who were believed to be complicit in the theft, were purged within weeks of BCL's audit report being released.

The findings of the BCL audit and the resulting purge in late 2018 angered expatriate staff who had been complaining that ongoing budget cuts (such as banning excursions, air conditioning and colour printing) were impacting the quality of their teaching, and negatively impacting the experience of students who board at the school. A leadership change in early 2019 offers a valuable chance for the school to mend its poor reputation.