Good school hunting: struggles, triumphs of Hong Kong children studying in UK after moving with families in BN(O) bid
- Former city residents seeking greener pastures with British scheme find themselves among intense competition for school slots under new system
- Some students from these families welcome new way of learning, but observers say there should also be attention paid to emotional wellness of such children
Three months before Lilian Lau left Hong Kong with her husband and two boys, she found their next home in Oxford and set about setting up the lease. As a secondary school teacher for 20 years, education was especially important to her, and she wanted to begin the paperwork to enrol her youngest son in the state school she and her husband felt would suit him best. She counts herself lucky they were successful.
“He could go to his first choice, but many parents say it has been difficult for them,” the 47-year-old said. “In hotspots, my neighbours’ children have gone to their third or fourth choice or even moved to a different town.”
Leaving Hong Kong was not Lau’s idea. Her husband, a former IT analyst, was worried how the city’s shifting political landscape might affect the future of their two sons, aged 12 and 15.
Taking advantage of their British National (Overseas) status, awarded by the city’s departing colonial rulers before the handover in 1997, they sold their flat and moved to Oxford last August. They decided on the central southern English town primarily because their eldest son had chosen one of its independent schools.
In the year since the BN(O) scheme launched, Manchester, Birmingham and southeast England have grown to be popular areas for the immigrants due to the choices in education. But even northern England, in cities such as Sheffield and Leeds, has witnessed competition for school places among new arrivals, according to local authorities.
Competition for school places is fierce in parts of England popular with new arrivals. Hongkongers have set up groups to help newly arrived parents understand the new education system as well as find access to mental health support.
Location, location, location
Rupert Gather, chairman of InvestUK, which works with agencies in Hong Kong to assist residents under the BN(O) scheme, said the overwhelming majority of immigrants were looking for government-funded schools, also known as state schools.
There are 24,413 schools in England, according to British government statistics, of which 20,249 are state-funded primary and secondary schools.
Competition for top institutions is high, given Hong Kong and British families are vying for places for their children. State schools draw their pupils from a catchment area, with the more popular ones having a smaller location. Some catchment areas could be numbered even down the level of streets, Gather noted.
“Finding the school is easy,” he said. “Finding the catchment area is difficult.”
Areas where property was relatively cheap and education good included Manchester, Birmingham and southeast England, such as Kent, he added.
Manchester and Canterbury also have grammar schools, which are state secondary schools that select their pupils by means of an examination taken by children at age 11, known as the “11-plus”. England only has 163 grammar schools out of about 3,000 state secondaries.
Iris Yip Yuen-ting, a consultant at Aston Education who helps place children in fee-paying schools, agreed that Kent, Surrey and parts of southeastern Britain were proving the most popular with Hong Kong families looking for independent institutions.
Manchester is another leading choice for both fee-paying and state schools. One institution in the city took in more than 100 students from Hong Kong last year.
Yip also pointed to a new trend of weekly boarders, meaning students lived on campuses from Monday to Friday and then with nearby relatives on weekends.
Another popular area is Nottingham, where Mark*, 44, and his wife Sharon, 44, moved in December 2020. They were not aware of the limited spaces for secondary schools for their son, who is 14.
At that time, neither parent could drive, which limited their choice of schools. They waited three months for their son to be placed in a state school, growing increasingly worried. Eventually, they decided to enrol him in an independent institution that costs HK$53,000 per term.
Mark revealed he had mixed feelings about their choice given the tuition fees were high compared with state schools, which were free. But he said his son was enthralled with his new environment, especially after-school activities such as cricket, rugby and the book club.
The tuition fee was a cost Mark had not factored in, but he said it was a sacrifice he was willing to make after his landlord, whose daughter also attended a fee-paying school, said the money would prove a worthwhile investment when his son took his GCSE and A-level exams.
The school arranged for his son to take extra English lessons, and within a single term, he had caught up on the curriculum, Mark said.
Their nine-year-old daughter enrolled in a state primary school within a month, the first pupil from Hong Kong in the class. But she was not as confident as her brother in her English-language abilities and was still working on reaching the same level as her classmates.
Sharon recalls her daughter came home one day crying. She had become lost at school and a girl had refused to share a pencil with her, a slight she felt was part of the girl’s bullying. But the situation improved when a second girl from Hong Kong joined the class and the one who had bullied her now wanted to make friends with the both of them.
According to Sharon, when other children from Hong Kong join the school but are unsure of how to speak English, her daughter tells them: “Don’t worry, in two weeks you will hear more of what they say.”
The children were also enjoying less homework. In Hong Kong, their son would often sit up until 2am toiling over assignments, which led to arguments, but now he could sleep much earlier, she said.
“There’s no more pressure, and the kids are happy with their parents also because they are not getting scolded. The only thing we now ask them is please don’t play with your games and watch TV,” she said with a laugh.
Missing home
But for other families, the period for their children to adjust to their new lives is longer. After the Lau family arrived in Oxford, they were surprised to discover how homesick their eldest son became. His mother approached the school to ask for counselling, as well as her general practitioner, but she found the process difficult. She eventually found a counsellor who spoke Cantonese and understood the political situation in Hong Kong, but she must drive an hour to take her son to his appointment every Saturday.
Lau noted that some pupils made fun of Hong Kong students for wearing masks at school, but after the Omicron variant made the pandemic worse, others followed suit and stopped teasing them.
The family’s struggle prompted Lau to join Hong Kong Well UK, which was set up in February, along with former journalist Shirley Yam and Reverend Kan Yu, both originally from the financial hub.
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The group has 80 volunteers including Hong Kong-born clinical psychologists, therapists and teachers who offer parents and children a way to navigate the British system and help find information about services available in the community.
One difference parents were coming to terms with involved their relationship with their children’s teachers.
In Hong Kong, parents were used to phoning the class teacher to convey their needs. Lau recalled that when she taught liberal studies in Hong Kong, some of her students had her mobile number and would send her WhatsApp messages outside office hours.
“It would be totally unacceptable in the UK. Teachers cannot have such close contact with parents and students,” she said, adding her advice for parents was to email the school and be patient when waiting for a reply.
Since February, Lau set up a team which has fielded 50 inquiries, with many of the requests coming from parents of children with special needs asking how they could apply for mental health support through the National Health Service or translation services.
Lau said other parents were worried watching their children miss Hong Kong and their friends and relatives. Some could not understand why their families had uprooted them, she said.
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While some children arrived with a history of mental health issues, others developed anxiety or depression after moving, Lau explained.
“Some parents feel heartbroken because they came to the UK because of their kids. They want them to have a more healthy life, but now they need to cope with the emotional fluctuations of their kids,” she said.
Lau can relate. Sometimes her son wanted to talk to her, but other times when he felt homesick, he locked himself in his room. Even with her experience of working as a registered social worker before becoming a teacher, she still found dealing with the situation tough at times, but speaking to other parents who were going through similar situations helped, she revealed.
“I also get support from the parents when I talk with them and say I have the same problem … because my sons and your sons are the same,” she said. “They are both newcomers and then I find more energy.”
The British government has identified mental health services as an area needing support, and community groups can apply to a £2.6 million fund for programmes to support Hong Kong immigrants under the BN(O) scheme.
With some students finding it difficult to communicate their feelings in English, Lau hoped that resources could be devoted to finding additional counsellors who spoke Cantonese.
Keeping the language alive
Church is vital to Mark and Sharon’s new life in Britain and their children regularly attend Sunday school as it is one place where they can continue to speak Cantonese with other children. Their congregation is almost two-thirds Hong Kong families.
Another way families keep the language alive is through exchanging books so children always have something new to read. Parents also trade recommendations about different Cantonese-language cartoons.
Preserving this part of their heritage is crucial to Mark’s family and other Hongkongers. Sharon said she already noticed schools in Hong Kong focused only on teaching Mandarin and television increasingly focused on mainland Chinese stars. It was only a matter of time before Cantonese disappeared, she feared.
“Every parent wants their kids to continue speaking in Cantonese and to never forget, because I think in Hong Kong later on there won’t be any chance of speaking it. We will lose our tradition. We will lose our words, our language, so we want to keep it, keep Cantonese and also traditional Chinese writing is important for us,” she said.
Some Hongkongers under the age of 25 who were originally excluded from the BN(O) scheme are considering moving to Britain on their own, after the government last month announced plans to extend the programme to residents born on or after July 1, 1997 and who have at least one parent with the status who has applied independently to settle in the country.
Yip has noticed an increase in Hongkongers seeking admission to British universities. Journalism student Jasmine*, whose father has a BN(O) passport, asked her parents to take up the citizenship offer but they refused. The 21-year-old Baptist University student is currently on a semester abroad in Scotland.
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Jasmine said she also feared Hong Kong was slowly losing its culture and hoped to help preserve it in another country.
“I feel leaving Hong Kong as a Hongkonger, I can still share our culture and history with other people in other countries” she said.
“I feel the city is under the influence or control of the Chinese government and Hong Kong has gradually been losing its own characteristics, the culture, the history, the architecture. I feel that as Hongkongers, we have a responsibility to protect them and pass them on.”
Jasmine’s generation is often referred to as the “cursed” or “chosen generation”. They were the residents born in 1997, and who lived through the deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome epidemic in 2003, swine fever, the 2014 Occupy Central protests, the 2019 anti-government demonstrations and finally the coronavirus pandemic that erupted in 2020.
She acknowledged that every generation has its own challenges to confront, but argued that culture was the biggest issue for her one. Her parents were “fully Chinese”, she said, while her cousins who ranged from about 10 to 20 years older than her in age had embraced a mix of Chinese and Western culture, she said.
“But in my generation, I feel like we are a mix of Western, Chinese and Hong Kong culture,” she said. “We have separated Hong Kong culture from Chinese culture. To us it is an independent special culture and obviously this separation has caused a lot of conflicts.”
While Jasmine said she would start her journalism career in Hong Kong, she no longer saw a future for herself in the city as she did not want to remain after 2047, when the high degree of autonomy the city was promised by Beijing comes to an end.
But she worried that when she did eventually migrate overseas, she would have to compete for jobs against native English-language speakers. She also wondered how she would support herself given she did not come from a well-off family.
Jasmine also expressed concerns over whether the influx of Hong Kong immigrants would stoke racism in Britain. She recalled feeling the sting of discrimination herself when she visited England seven years ago. She said she was waiting at a bus stop next to a park with Hong Kong friends when they noticed a group of children, who shouted: “Hey Asians!”
“When we turned and looked at them, their parents were beside them and did not stop them,” she said.
“It didn’t discourage me from moving to the UK, because overall speaking, my experience has been pretty good both in England and Scotland. I think it is fine for me.
“To be honest, discrimination happens everywhere. I think it is inevitable, and I don’t think that if I move to a foreign country, the chances that I will face discrimination will be significantly higher than the city I grew up in.”
*Names changed at interviewees’ request
