Rules on middle school admissions in Beijing have been streamlined to allow more children of migrant workers access to free compulsory education.

The new policy, which means citizens with or without hukou - permanent residency - will enjoy equal entrance requirements, is expected to benefit more than 30,000 youngsters.

"The changes will ensure every child has a school to go to, regardless of where they were born," Luo Jie, deputy director of the capital's education commission, said on May 6, the first day of middle school enrollment.

Instead of having to provide five certificates to apply for admission, parents of students now only need to offer proof of their residential address and hometown hukou. Previous requirements for temporary residency permits, employment certificates and other family details have been scrapped, said Luo.

More than 102,000 children graduated from primary schools across the capital this year, with 33.4 percent from families without Beijing hukou.

Many migrant mothers, however, say they will wait and see if the new policy makes an impact before deciding on their children's future, such as Ma Liqin, who has a 9-year-old daughter at Nanshatan Primary School in Chaoyang district.

Ma told METRO she had been planning to send her daughter back to Jilin province, as friends warned her it will cost up to 30,000 yuan in "sponsorship" fees to get her into a Beijing middle school. "But if the policy is enforced, she will stay here because Beijing has better educational resources," she said.

Yang Yuanqing, a nanny living in Beijing for more than two decades, started a petition in March 2010 with 381 parents to demand Haidian district's education commission treat youngsters without hukou fairly. Almost 1,500 people signed.

As the mother of a 12-year-old son, she complained that she now had two options: wade through the bureaucracy at dozens of middle schools in the hope that one will admit her child or pay a 40,000-yuan "sponsorship" fee to enroll him in an elite middle school in Haidian.

Apart from the revamped admissions procedure, the municipal government has also introduced preferential policies for Chinese talents who return from working overseas. "If a returnee selected for the central government's talent program wants to enroll his or her child in a bilingual school, we'll work with relevant government agencies to arrange it," said Luo.

However, officials said no changes have been made to the policy requiring students to apply to the school nearest to their neighborhood.

China Daily

(China Daily 05/09/2011)