Day Six – Farewell to Beijing
You can follow Michael Russell’s journey here.
Thursday finished with yet another dinner meeting – the Chinese love food and are incredibly inventive with it. On every street, no matter the district, you will see small shops in which keen diners are sharing hot pot or choosing from long menus. At events the dishes keep coming and it is hard to know what some of them are. Tonight’s first for all of us was jellyfish served with shredded cabbage.
The guests at this dinner, hosted by Patrick Horgan from the British Council in Beijing (who was brought up in Sanquhar – Scots get everywhere) were Chinese alumni of Scottish Universities. They are the best possible ambassadors for Scottish Higher Education and they are keen to tell others how good it is. I hope that we will make more use of them in the years to come.
It is clear from my trip that China wants long term relationships with other countries. Accordingly the two previous visits by the First Minister and the two made by Fiona Hyslop have paid dividends in the educational field, as has the long term work of the Universities, the SQA and Learning and Teaching Scotland.
Janet Brown of SQA accompanied me to my first Friday meeting which was the centrepiece of the trip, an hour with the Vice Minister of Education Hao Ping. He knew a great deal about Scotland and was keen to engage on a range of issues including higher education, vocational education, the training of teachers and the provision of services in rural areas. We exchanged lots of information and committed our respective Governments to developing closer ties on all these areas and to plan some pilot projects. All of us left the meeting very grateful for the enthusiastic reception we had enjoyed and impressed that Scotland featured so clearly on their radar.
That was also true at the Hanban, the Chinese Language Organisation where the work of LTS was commended with the signing of an extended Memorandum of Understanding which enhances the status of Scotland’s Confucius Classrooms. These reach more than half of Scotland’s schools and are seen by the Hanban as a model of delivery. They are also interested in Glow and its potential and were the focus of some very direct questions and requests for co-operation from the animated Director Madame Xu Lin.
Our penultimate visit was to a school for children of migrant workers, Xing He, where we were greeted at the door by the founding Principal Li Shouyi who founded the school as there was no local provision for such children. He is clearly an inspirational teacher, and educational manager. We were shown to an English class where the pupils were aged 12 and in their final year. The children were incredibly well mannered, well presented and very, very friendly. Led by their enthusiastic teacher, the children interacted in an amusing Q&A in English and sang us a few songs to welcome us to their class – including a prefect rendition of Auld Lang Syne.
We then met formally with the Head Teacher who told us about the school and the education system. In the course of the conversation he was told that my wife was a Head Teacher and he was very keen to learn about what she did in a much smaller school. Like all our hosts he was painstaking in his attention to our party and as we left he clasped my hand and quoted Confucius ” It is a delight to have a friend travel from afar”. It was a very touching moment.
After the school visit there was just time to get back to the hotel and change into my kilt, before we walked a couple of blocks to the skyscraper where the SQA were hosting their first ever overseas awards ceremony, an event which included a presentation to the 10,000 successful HND Student in China. I joined Janet Brown of the SQA on the stage with Mr Gong Wan, Deputy Director General of the Chinese Service Centre for Scholarly Exchange and amongst the entertainment provided was a stunning group of young Chinese girl drummers – very non traditional according to Mr Gong, but they made the stage shake!
The kilt goes down very well in China and it was hard to get away at the end, for all the photographs that were asked for. But I had a final interview to do with the China Business Weekly in which we discussed Higher Education and its links with business.
After a very full week it was then the first piece of downtime – so we all went for dinner at a Vietnamese Restaurant some distance from the hotel, which resulted in an eventful journey there and back, courtesy of the unique Beijing taxi service.
9 comments
According to The British Council’s new Education UK website
Wolverhampton is in Wales. Is this a ploy to fool Confucius?!
http://dblackie.blogs.com/the_language_business/2010/09/british-council-panics-again.html
Scots who cannae spell do indeed ‘get everywhere’ …. when I used to work for George Foulkes in South Ayrshire, however,
there was no ‘E’ in ‘Sanquer’ (sic). That must be either Marr
College’s own variant or The British Council fouling up again.
Check back with British Council’s Patrick Horgan but I think
you’ll find the Ayrshire village even in the days of Auld Lang
Syne was ‘Sanquar’? And there’s no Welsh Wolverhampton.
Not the first time of course that Scottish Government Learning Directorate has made the mistake of trying to replace an ‘A’
(as in ‘SSTA’?) with an ‘E’ (as in ‘EIS’)?! Perhaps if Ministers
and senior civil servants had the good sense to get back into
discussions with the Spelling ‘Bs’ they’d ‘Bee a part of better’
Thank you, Cabinet Secretary, for your very lively and evocative blog of your time in China. It is splendid to see that the Scottish Education Secretary was received by Hao Ping, the Vice Minister of Education, and that Madame Xu Lin, the Director General of Hanban, is so interested in Scottish Education and so willing to collaborate. We have so much to learn from each other. Your presence, and the earlier visit of the First Minister, are so important in the efforts of all educational institutions at all levels and in all sectors in Scotland as they strive to enable our young people to engage with China, to be prepared for the international world of work, and if at all possible to learn Chinese. We are making considerable progress: the lively accounts of Louise Allen and Jenna Cowan from Bathgate Academy show just how Scottish pupils want to learn Chinese, however challenging a language it is, and about China.
As the proud inheritor of 13 volumes of Joseph Needham’s
‘Science and Civilisation in China’ (chucked in a skip by a
Scottish university which had better remain nameless) I’m
heartened by the enthusiasm – of Bathgate Academy and
other young people to engage with and to learn from China.
But personally I still think learning and teaching French and
German should remain a linguistic priority here in Scotland.
I’ve just bought a Swedish dictionary to help me watch the
Stieg Larsson films without sub-titles and I am finding that
my high school German helps me engage with Swedish. I
have never been to China – but 40 years ago I went with a
British India school trip (which included both Selkirk High
and Bo’ness Academy) to the Baltic which will probably
freeze again before I ever set foot in Beijing ……………..
Chinese interest in Scottish education and curriculum reform of course stretches back to at least the 1980’s – when I seem
to remember delegations coming from China to learn from the
old Scottish Consultative Committee on The Curriculum when
it was developing the 10-14 programme as an antidote having earlier sparked Chinese interest in ‘modules’? Of course back
in those days there were about 900 experienced teachers in almost every part of Scotland actively involved in the SCCC
subject area committees who were driving curricular reform
in dialogue with “the dinosaurs” living in St Andrews House.
Happy days – remembered perhaps only by the SSTA …..?
There were of course back in the 1980’s far fewer education authorities in Scotland for busy Ministers to deal with – but
one other critical difference that was always pointed out to
the Chinese was that there was no national curriculum in Scotland – deliberately so as to spark creativity and give
our teachers room to teach – but that there were still the
checks and balances provided by an independent band
of HM Inspectors dispersed across the country and the
other critical feature of the system was the ’statutory’ role
and status of the Director of Education who back then was
generally an education professional not a service manager.
The SQA was of course in those days still the Exam Board
and in a state of flux as ever in the wake of Munn & Dunning
- but Scottish qualifications could still be generally trusted?
Examiners were also valued people – unlike British Council ‘examiners’ in China who I hear operate on
tourist visas which does seem a little ‘unorthodox’?
Mind you, a day oot o’ Sanquar is a day wasted?!
Many thanks to all those have been participating in this blog discussion.
You many be interested in the following additional information about the purpose of the visit.
Collectively, Scottish universities’ international activities contribute more than £500 million to the economy and there are more than 5,000 students from China studying in Scotland. As part of our continuing commitment to promote Scotland’s educational excellence overseas the Education Secretary met with the Chinese Ministry of Education, the Hong Kong Education Secretary and the Tianjin Municipal Government.
The programme promoted key initiatives such as Saltire scholarships; the awarding of SQA qualifications in China and allowed discussions on key issues such as renewable energy. Final costs will be published in due course as a Parliamentary answer.
Hopefully this will clarify some of the reasons for the China visit and answer some of the general questions here. I will add a further link to the Parliamentary question once it has been published.
Kind Regards
Maria Campbell, Engage Community Manager