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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.

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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.