Since arriving on Monday, the seven-strong group, led by Education Minister Rod Bryans, have visited five schools and met representatives from the Hanban Institute, the organisation that will be providing Hautlieu School with a teacher of Mandarin after it was made the 1,000th Confucius Classroom by Chinese President Xi Jinping in a ceremony in London last week.
- Hautlieu School has been twinned with Beijing Bayi Middle School, a high school in Beijing, since 2011.
- The partnership was agreed in June that year after Jerseys then foreign minister, Freddie Cohen, made an official visit to the country to develop ties between the two places.
- Beijing Bayi was established in March 1947 in the Fuping Country of Hebei Province and moved to Beijing in 1949.
- It is now one of the key high schools in the Haidian district of Beijing and has around 3,400 students, as well as more than 250 teachers and more than 100 teaching assistants and administration staff.
- Announcing the twinning in 2011, Senator Cohen said: This is a fabulous opportunity for Jersey students to develop an understanding of the largest developing economy in the world through interaction with Chinese students.
- Hautlieu School had requested the twinning after a group of 80 students and staff visited China the previous year.
Confucius Classroom status is given to mainstream schools which have the Chinese language on the curriculum and can offer advice and support to other schools nearby that are considering teaching the language.
There are currently 42 Confucius Classrooms in England.
On the first day of the trip Deputy Bryans gave a speech at the Confucius Institute headquarters in Beijing.
The party then moved to Shanghai, where they have spent the past two days visiting primary, middle and secondary schools in China’s second largest city.
Also on the trip are Le Rocquier head teacher Phil Slater, JCG head Carl Howarth, Highlands College principal Steve Lewis, La Moye head Jacqueline Bell-Cook, d’Auvergne head Cris Lakeman and Seán O’Regan, Education’s head of standards and achievement.
Deputy Bryans said that so far the trip had been ‘hugely informative’ and that the group had had several discussions about twinning Jersey schools with those in China.
The party are visiting their last schools today. They are due to arrive back in Jersey on Monday.
- LAST October, the JEP reported that Mandarin Chinese and Portuguese lessons could be offered to all Island youngsters to keep Jersey competitive and promote trade links with other countries, according to a new report.
- The two languages, which are already offered to some children on a limited basis, have been identified as possible options for increasing the language curriculum locally in a report lodged with the States.
- The then Education Minister Patrick Ryans report concluded that both languages would help Jersey to trade with other countries, particularly Brazil and China.
- It also suggested that languages should be taught from as young an age as possible, ideally in nurseries and reception classes.
- A survey of parents with nursery-age children found wide support for a bilingual school in Jersey. Of the 256 people who responded, 60 per cent said they would send their child to a school where lessons are taught in more than one language if one were available, and 66 per cent said that the second language at such a school should be French.
