The past few months have been tough for Henry Jiang. Over two decades, he built Grandville International into a successful London-based advisory firm by tapping into a lucrative source of business for fee-paying schools in the UK: growing demand from parents in mainland China for a British education for their children.
Now, coronavirus has reduced this demand and hit his consultancy in its wake. “We are struggling, to be honest,” he says. “With the one-child policy in China [more recently revised to two and then three], safety is always the priority for families. Since the pandemic started, parents and students have become quite worried about coming to the UK, and [most] of those who were studying here have returned home.”
For Jiang, and for many of the schools at which he and other agents have helped place foreign students, Covid-19 has overturned a steady growth in the UK’s appeal to China’s middle classes. As they grew richer, they became more open to educating the next generation abroad.