Students from China are complaining that private high schools in Canada take advantage of them by not properly teaching English and then inflating their grades in a dubious attempt to qualify them for university.

Immigration officers in the Canadian embassy in Beijing are worried about increasing reports in China that small private Canadian secondary schools are abusing the country’s fast-growing international-school program and harming Canada’s global reputation.

Many of the private Canadian high schools that target young people from China, which focus on teaching English, are located in shopping malls and have “very few students,” says an internal Immigration Department report obtained under an access to information request.

Canada took in a record 642,000 foreign students in 2019, three times more than in 2009. The latest figure includes 141,000 students from China, one in three of whom are in B.C. For the first time in decades the volume of students from China in Canada reflects an annual decline, of 0.5 per cent, according to the Canadian Bureau for International Education.

About one in seven of the international students in Canada, almost 90,000, enrol in secondary school programs, some of which are privately run.

“There is concern that the excellent reputation of education in Canada may be decreasing in the China market. … (We are) concerned that some of our programs are currently being abused, and corrective action should be taken,” said the immigration officials stationed in the capital of China.

The Canadian embassy staff have been increasingly hearing from officials and parents that young people from China are going to Canada’s “lower quality schools, with very few students enrolled, mainly Chinese nationals, one or two classrooms in the school and very often (the) institution is located in a shopping mall.”

University administrators and Chinese officials have both told Canadian embassy staff that Chinese students attending the private secondary schools have “very low English abilities after two to three years in such institutions. … Some of the schools are inflating the grades of the students to allow them to be admitted to some of the top universities in Canada.”

A Vancouver immigration lawyer, Richard Kurland, obtained the 2017 Immigration Department document two years after filing an access to information request. He said he’s never seen such a direct demand from an embassy for Canada’s provincial politicians, who control education, to solve a problem.

“Rare is an internal report so plain. It’s dramatic. The gloves are off. We should fix this,” said Kurland.

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A spokesperson for B.C.’s Education Ministry said the province is home to 364 private, or so-called independent, schools, which teach kindergarten-to-Grade 12 students. They include schools that are religious, expensive and those that which specialize in foreign students.

Although B.C.’s ministry doesn’t track the K-12 private schools that cater to international students, the spokesperson said there are almost 5,000 “non-resident” students in private schools in the province. No further breakdown was available.

Asked about the Canadian embassy’s worries that students from China are paying large fees to attend low-quality private schools in Canada, a B.C. Education Ministry official said it had “not been made aware of this concern.”

When Immigration Department officials in Ottawa were asked what they’re doing to fix the problem of poor-calibre private language schools, a spokesperson said, “As education is the responsibility of provincial/territorial governments … you may wish to consult provincial/territorial governments on their policies.”

Steve Kaufman, a former Canadian diplomat in Hong Kong and China who also created the LingQ language program, said many English-language schools in Canada are ineffective.

“That’s in part because of antiquated teaching methods, and in part because it is too easy for Chinese students to blend into the Chinese community here.”

Kaufman, who speaks 20 languages and routinely does business in Asia, pointed to a Canadian study that found Mandarin-speaking newcomers have a much harder time learning English than people from other cultures, including Eastern European, in part because they tend to isolate among people of their language group.

The Institute for Research on Public Policy discovered the Mandarin-speaking newcomers it tracked had made “no significant progress” in their English fluency seven years after arriving in Canada. A University of Alberta professor, Tracey Derwing, found most avoided conversations with English-speaking Canadians.

The internal report from the Canadian embassy in Beijing said parents in China have an extremely hard time figuring out which language schools in Canada are legitimate.

The parents’ search is limited by their own lack of ability in English and by “the Great Firewall of China,” says the immigration report, referring to the way the People’s Republic of China blocks access to many foreign websites.

The embassy staff in Beijing said parents often have to make school choices for their children based on the advice of Chinese-speaking agents who make their pitches at “big education fairs in China every year.”

The more than 680,000 students that China sends aboard to study each year frequently make news headlines, particularly when worries arose among educators in the U.S. and Canada that a trade war would cause a dramatic drop in the number of high-fee-paying students from the populous country.

There were more than 145,000 foreign students in B.C. in 2019, of which more than 43,000 were from China. The B.C. Education Ministry’s website says international education makes up B.C.’s “third largest export.”

dtodd@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/@douglastodd