Education sector fears damaging long-term impact from coronavirus

China’s decision to cancel English language testing due to the coronavirus means the damage to education will be long lasting.

International Education Association of Australia chief executive Phil Honeywood. Photo: Aaron Francis

The $39bn-a-year education export industry is bracing for long-term damage from the coronavirus following the decision of Chinese authorities to cancel English tests for Chinese students planning to study overseas.

China’s National Education Examinations Authority on Monday cancelled February testing in mainland China by two of the major global English proficiency test providers, IELTS and TOEFL, which both accredit students applying to study in Australia.

The interruption to English testing means that, even in the best case of the coronavirus being quickly contained, the flow of Chinese students arriving in Australia for second semester later in the year is likely to be affected.

International Education Association of Australia chief executive Phil Honeywood said the test delay was an obstacle.

“Clearly many Australian education providers will be concerned about their forward planning in the light of this decision,” Mr Honeywood said.

“The higher education sector will need to lobby the Chinese government to have these exams reinstated at the earliest possible opportunity once the virus crisis has been overcome.”

University of Wollongong vice-chancellor Paul Wellings said on Tuesday the concentration of Chinese students in Sydney, compared with other areas of Australia, meant any interruption caused by the coronavirus would have a disproportionate economic impact on the city.

About 34,000 Chinese students are studying in Sydney.

“The knock-on effect economically is potentially quite large. You only need a relatively small downturn in students coming from China to see quite a substantial effect across the sector,” he said.

But Professor Wellings said Australia was more fortunate in dealing with the crisis than universities in Britain because the university year had not yet started here, which allowed time to medically assess incoming students and make other preparations.

In the northern hemisphere, Chinese students who went home for the end-of-year break might have come in contact with the coronavirus and already be back in class, mixing with other students.

But Professor Wellings warned we were “at the bottom of the S-curve” of the coronavirus outbreak: “How far it goes and how big it becomes is an epidemiological question.”

Following a meeting of federal cabinet’s national security committee meeting on Monday, Mr Tehan broadened the role of the government’s global reputation taskforce to include the impact of the coronavirus on higher education exports.

The taskforce, chaired by Mr Honeywood, was set up last week to protect education providers from the impact that bushfires had on Australia’s education industry.

Its membership — which already included state and territory governments and representatives from all education sectors — has now been expanded to include the federal Department of Health and Department of Home Affairs as well as other experts.

“Clearly this is going to be a very challenging task but our international education sector has become well used to coping with crisis in a collaborative manner,” Mr Honeywood said.

The Department of Health on Tuesday issued new fact sheets to universities that asked them to identity students and staff members who had been in China’s Hubei province, the centre of the outbreak, in the past 14 days.

The department said if they had symptoms they “should be excluded from attending the university or vocational education facility until they are assessed by their primary care provider”.

Universities are following Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade advice and cancelling travel to Hubei province, as well as considering if students and staff should travel to China at all. The University of Sydney said on Tuesday it was “assessing options for students due to commence placement or study exchanges to China in semester one”.

Scape, one of Australia’s largest student accommodation companies, said 60 per cent of its 14,000 students were from China and Taiwan and it had introduced protocols that included asking arriving students to register their place of origin and travel routes and have a medical assessment

The company also had cleaning crews disinfecting buildings daily, Scape Australia chairman Craig Carracher said.

He said most students in his company’s accommodation lived in their own self-contained studios, with their own kitchen and bathroom, which already was a “relatively internally quarantined environment”.

In a statement on Tuesday the National Union of Students and the Council of International Students Australia jointly warned against misinformation and negative views of Chinese people in discussion of the coronavirus.

“We would like to emphasise that this is a public health issue that affects the entire student body, any form of sinophobia or racism in Australia in regards to this outbreak is unacceptable,” the two student groups said.

Additional reporting: Jill Rowbotham