Standard varies

Some parents said they had encountered problems at educational institutions, including foreign teachers who frequently changed jobs and some who were obviously not native English speakers.

Li said she worked part time at an institution in the summer holidays, when the number of foreign teachers was insufficient to meet the sharp growth in the number of pupils.

"The standard of foreign teachers varied greatly, and the threshold was not high. But in their advertisements, each institution said it only hired native speakers with teaching experience of a certain number of years," she said.

A foreign teacher working at an institution in Shanghai, who gave his name only as James, said he is an exchange scholar on an educational program at a nearby university. He chose to work at the institution to enrich his experience in China.

"I had previously worked as a one-on-one home tutor for Chinese kids. I now have the opportunity to meet more children and their families," said James, who comes from the United Kingdom.

He said that some colleagues are clearly not native English speakers and have passports issued by a range of countries. But some of them have TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) or TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) qualifications.

"However, they are not qualified to teach in international schools, which require teachers to be native speakers, and some recruit graduates from teaching colleges only," said James, adding that teachers with institutions where English is taught are paid nearly 20,000 yuan per month.

Wang Chenshuang, mother of a 4-year-old boy in Chongqing, spent 4,000 yuan on 40 online English tutoring sessions for her son, but soon regretted it.

"Such tutoring helps parents save time traveling, but kids are easily distracted when sitting in front of a laptop at home," Wang said.

Market players said some entrepreneurs had entered the children's education sector in the past five years as they were optimistic about the prospects, but an eagerness to cash in sometimes meant that quality was sacrificed.

Wang, who graduated from a foreign language university, said she now teaches her son English by talking to him in the language each day and by helping him read children's books. She also plans to send him to an overseas summer camp.

"We hope English will become a tool for him to connect with people from around the world as China's international profile continues to rise," she said.

"He will read more English-language books than I did, which will help him form a more diversified mindset and look at the world from different perspectives."