Long waiting lists for English-medium schooling in Hong Hong could prove an opportunity for one school across the estuary: the International School of Macau is hoping to catch the eye of ambitious parents with its new boarding facilities.
TIS was set up nine years ago by two former leaders of Canadian International School to cater for children of expatriates recruited to work in Macau's liberalised gaming industry, and the burgeoning local middle class.
The school has already notched up top-tier results in international tests of maths and reading and the Alberta school-leaving diploma.
It now has 830 pupils aged three to 18 in a building designed for 1,000, and expects to have 900 by September. Growth projections were scaled back when the casino boom stalled in 2008.
Yet as the enclave's economic recovery gathers pace, TIS is launching a boarding programme for its secondary section, which is targeted at pupils in Hong Kong and across China, in a bid to kick-start further expansion. The first boarders are to start in September.
The move comes one year ahead of the opening of Harrow International School Hong Kong, the territory's first international boarding school and flagship of the government's drive to develop Hong Kong as a regional education hub.
TIS is drawing up plans for a 300-bed boarding house with gym and swimming pool - to be completed by 2013 - and a 400-seat classroom block for its kindergarten and primary sections next to its main building.
It is converting a neighbouring student hostel of the Macau University of Science and Technology, whose campus it shares, into a house for 70 boarders admitted over the next two academic years.
Full and weekly boarding will be offered, with fees of 75,000 patacas per year and 50,000 patacas a year respectively for rooms with four pupils sharing, and 95,000 patacas a year and 70,000 a year for two sharing.
Added to the 77,500 patacas tuition fee for a grade 12 pupil (age 17-18), the total fee for a full boarder with one room-mate will be 152,500 patacas. Casual boarding will also be an option.
Founding-governor John Crawford says: 'We are aiming to pull students in from Hong Kong, Macau and from across Greater China who are seeking a high-quality Canadian education.' Crawford says the fees are notably lower than those of 'comparable international schools' in Hong Kong and Shanghai - and there will be 'no debentures at all'.
Head of Schools Howard Stribbell says: 'I expect that initially we will attract most of our boarding students from Hong Kong, given the ease of immigration and the scarcity of school places there. We will have scheduled pick-up and drop-off times for students taking the ferry to Hong Kong on the weekends. We will escort students to the ferry and they will be picked up by their parents at the other end.'
The temporary boarding house will occupy one floor of the university hostel, with boarders sharing the entrance hall with undergraduates. It will have separate sections for boys and girls overseen by a residential housemaster and housemistress respectively. Students will also have use of a common room and pantry. Boarders will be offered two extra-curricular activities per day including sport. The school has use of an Olympic-standard gymnasium and stadium, which were inherited from the 2005 East Asian Games and are also close to the school for two days a week.
'In our boarding hostels, we will have a rule that children have to speak English all the time, even when they are in their rooms,' Stribbell says. 'This is about creating a powerful environment where students can really excel.'
TIS offers the curriculum of the Canadian province of Alberta, which achieved the fourth-highest scores in the world for science in the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and fifth highest in reading - just behind Hong Kong in both subjects.
The curriculum includes pure and applied streams, with all pupils required to take the core subjects of mathematics, science, English and social studies, plus a range of electives to gain the school-leaving diploma.
Macau also takes part in PISA, which tests 15-year-olds in maths, reading and science, and the school's results in 2009 were on a par with the Shanghai average in reading and maths - the highest of any country or region. It came in sixth place, below Japan, for science.
Stribbell says that among the first 27 school leavers in 2009, 75 per cent took at least four exams in the diploma, with 26.9 per cent of entries resulting in grades at 'excellent' level, putting TIS among the top 5 per cent of Albertan schools on both measures. 'Out of the first 60 students who took the diploma in 2009 and 2010, 58 got into university,' he says.
Stribbell says the boarding programme is likely to bring in pupils from the mainland and wider region who have 'lower English skills, because they haven't been in our system'.
To cater for such pupils, the school is launching a four-year intensive English programme, which provides 18 months of English tuition before gradually introducing them into the mainstream curriculum. They would start at age 15 in grade 10 and graduate from grade 12 at age 18 - one year later than normal.
'It is designed to enable students with limited English to go straight to university without taking a foundation programme,' Stribbell says.
Founding-governor Neil Johnston says the school already has 34 mainlanders as day pupils, after they were granted permission to study in the enclave by the Macau government.
'Mainland students applying to study at secondary level in Macau are dealt with on a case-by-case basis by the secretary for security,' he says, adding that there is no student visa system for school children. 'When people arrive in Macau they get a tourist visa, and in order to attend school, they need to get the visa extended to one year.
'For Hong Kong students that is not a problem because the tourist visa is for one year. European passport holders have a 90-day visa and they would apply to extend it to one year.'
Richard Vuylsteke, president of Hong Kong's American Chamber of Commerce, says new boarding initiative could help 'in a small way' to alleviate the shortage of international school places in Hong Kong. 'There are a lot of people in Hong Kong desperately looking for an international school place,' he says. 'If they have a facility that is pretty good and it's only an hour away, that is a pretty good option for many families.'