Education has become perhaps the greatest area of focus for me over the last few years in terms of my personal research. I think in part because it has become abundantly clear to how far behind the education system is in the adoption of technology and how teaching methodologies have barely changed from the manufacturing models generated over 100 years ago.

But even more than this education has been important in my research as it seems to always come up as the only viable long-term solution to most of the issues we face in a global society. Everything is changing (there is nothing new here, so it could be argued nothing changes) and we need a generation of leadership that understand global economics, global geopolitical issues, global environmental issues and even the changing face of conflict. Tomorrows generals will need to be radically different from today’s just as much as tomorrow business and political leaders will need to be different from todays.

While this post is not the place where I will dig into these issues it a place to begin to see how China is viewing education.

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Acquisitions such as the ones by Lenovo and TCL are attempts to enrich China’s impoverished repertoire of corporate brands. On a human level, the same impulse for respect and invisible capital motivates a vast demand for overseas education. Although Beijing’s record in improving the availability and quality of the education it provides for its people has been impressive, there is an insatiable thirst for more. And the branding that comes with a degree from a good foreign university, such as Harvard and MIT or Oxford and Cambridge, is valued at least as much by Chinese society as the knowledge that may have been acquired there. It is difficult to comprehend quite the size of potential demand in this area. In the past, for instance, the flow of qualified Chinese applicants to such universities was circumscribed by a lack of financial resources, substandard teaching in some Chinese schools and an imperfect mastery of the English required for the entrance examination. But now that China’s ‘middle class’ has swelled to include roughly 150 million people, and education loads secured against property are available form state banks, the potential increase in applications is enormous. English is becoming less of a barrier now that an estimated 200 million people are studying it across the nation. Teaching standards are shooting up and hundreds of thousands of gifted children, who just a decade ago would have been denied anything but a rudimentary education, are now thriving under competent tuition. What this portends for the world can be seen in the 2004 participation numbers at the annual international Science and Engineering Fair run by Intel the US semiconductor company. In the US, 65,000 students participated in local fairs to select finalists. In China, six million did.

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The benefit to Dulwich from accepting several clever Chinese students each is year is that their performance bolsters the school’s reputation. Parents who send their children to fee-paying schools in the UK make their choices increasingly on the basis of their rank in ‘league tables’ of exam result achievers. Good students, therefore, boost a school’s exam result average, while brilliant pupils – such as those who win scholarships to top US or UK universities – give their headmasters something to boast about when prospective parents come to look around on open day. The elitism, in other words, has become self-perpetuating. The best schools lure the best potential students, who then improve their school’s performance and so on. This dynamic, though pervasive, is far from universally popular. In the UK, just as in China, some teachers and parents bemoan an intensifying culture of competition that can place unbearable strain on pupils while depriving them of time to play sport and indulge in the cherished aimlessness of childhood. But no matter what misgivings parents may have, the root cause of the trend is clear; just as today’s world is global to an extent unprecedented in history, the world of tomorrow will be more so. The current generation of Dulwich College students, if they choose when they are adults to work in an international business, will have to compete for their jobs with many more candidates than do their predecessors today. Faced with this hyper-competitive vista, the reaction of many may be to opt out of the globalized market place and take up locally focused jobs that may pay less but offer a more sane existence.

But Able is in no doubt about where he is heading. The world is becoming more global and education has to follow. This conviction drives his school’s overseas expansion. By most reckonings, Dulwhich is already the world’s most internationalized secondary school, with a campus in Phuket, Thailand as well as Shanghai and Beijing. There are now plans for six more franchised international schools in China and negotiations are well advanced to set up three joint ventures as well. A search for an opening in India is also drawing to a close and Able is sure that Dulwhich will have a school there in the not-too-distant future. There could also be one in the Gulf, he adds. The income form the franchise fees and a per-pupil fee in all of its overseas branches will return to Dulwhich in London, where it will fund bursaries for clever boys from the UK and elsewhere in the world. The final aim, Able explains, is to expand the Dulwich financial endowment to a size at which the school becomes ‘needs blind at the point of entry’. In other words, so wealthy that it can offer scholarships to anyone, regardless of their circumstances, whose presence will enhance the school’s brand. The hope is, Able says, that in a few decades’ time Dulwich will be to secondary schools what Harvard is now to universities.