Beijing pays UK schools to teach Chinese culture

Confucius, the 6th century BC Chinese philosopher, always told his disciples to study the outside world in detail. So he would have been delighted by the announcement yesterday that five state schools in the UK are to become "Confucius classrooms" - dedicated to promoting the study of Chinese culture and language.

For the schools, it will mean extra money to spread the study of the subject throughout their regions and the chance for their pupils to go on exchange trips and summer camps to China itself.

The first 175 pupils and their teachers will leave the UK next week to attend a summer camp in Beijing.

The project is being financed by Hanban - China's equivalent of the British Council - which aims to promote Chinese culture throughout the world. Hanbean is giving each school £3,000 to help get the project off the ground.

All five - which include a selective grammar school in Wirral, a comprehensive serving one of east London's most deprived areas and a privately sponsored academy in Nottingham - have already started teaching Mandarin. The five were chosen by the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, which now represents 2,600 of t he country's 2,950 state secondary schools and was itself awarded Confucius Institute status to spread the teaching of Chinese culture.

One, Calday Grange Grammar School in Merseyside, has already begun spreading the teaching of Mandarin to its feeder primary schools. Children as young as six are now starting to learn the language.

One of the barriers to improving the take-up of Mandarin in schools has been that the GCSE exam was designed for those speaking it as a first language. But the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority is now redrafting the syllabus so that it can be learnt as a foreign language in the same way as French or German.

Andrew Hall, the headteacher at Calday Grange, said: "I believe passionately that today's students will only become tomorrow's generation of creative academics and entrepreneurs if they are given time and space to learn about the world outside the school gate.

"It is clear to me that our most urgent priority in achieving this goal is for all students to learn more about China and Chinese culture and for a healthy number of these students to learn Mandarin Chinese to GCSE level and beyond.

"We will fail our students if we do not open their eyes to this and enable many of them to leave school with some knowledge of China."

Last year saw the first cohort of A-level Mandarin candidates at the school. This year 50 students have opted to study it in their first year - making it likely that at least 350 students will be taking it by the time they take their A-levels, out of a school of 1,500 pupils.

At Hummersknot School, a specialist language college in Darlington, the headteacher, Patrick Howarth, plans to use his Confucius classroom money to arrange three-month exchange visits with a Chinese school - Country Garden school in the Guangong province. The school has also arranged a pre-season tour for Darlington Football Club to China.

"The benefits are clear, both in terms of school aims and in personal advantage to students in the employment market, of being able to speak and communicate in Mandarin," Mr Howarth added.

As well as receiving cash to promote teaching Chinese culture in neighbouring schools, the five will be linked to Beijing University - which will provide them with resources to improve their facilities. More than 100 Chinese teachers will arrive as part of an exchange in September.

Professor Zhang Gouyou, vice-president of humanities and social sciences at Beijing University, said the project would "play a significant role in promoting English youths' understanding of Chinese language and culture, the exchanges between young people of the countries and the friendship between the two nations".

Confucius would undoubtedly say that was a very good thing.

Chinese is music to the ears

"It's all Chinese to me," was how thorny linguistic problems were described when I was growing up. But take heart - spoken Chinese is relatively easy to learn. It's all in the tones. If you can sing, or if you can play a musical instrument, then you are in a good position to learn Chinese.

There are four tones, and you just have to memorise what sound each word has. The Chinese are forgiving about tonal errors, though there are some hilarious examples of people mixing up their tones and being wildly insulting. People will, without fail, tell you your Chinese is excellent if you manage to just say Ni hao (Hello) or Xie xie (Thank you). It's tremendously encouraging. And more good news. There is no grammar as such, no datives, accusatives, vocatives, ablatives, none of the complications that make English a terrifying prospect for many Asians. Verb tenses are changed simply by adding a small participle, so there are none of the complications of French or German.

That said, it's a tricky language to learn extremely well. And written Chinese is, alas, not easy. Opinions vary but you need nearly 2,000 characters to read the headlines in a newspaper. But learning characters is excellent fun. Try it.

Clifford Coonan, China Correspondent

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