The year 2024 was a year full of challenge and hope for HOPE! Confronting the complexity of international affairs, economic situation and changeable foreign and domestic policies, HOPE has been transforming its business steadily to cater for the new market demand. The key words of the year are ‘diversification’, ‘innovation’ and ‘sustainability’!
Diversified products and service. HOPE continued to attach great importance to developing new education products and services for clients after pandemic. For instance, with more and more enquiries on studying in Southeast Asia countries, HOPE explored an academic camp with National University of Singapore, established partnership with University of Southampton Malaysia Campus, Epsom College in Malaysia, Forest City International School in Malaysia. These will be useful supplement to our existing main partners in the UK, US, Australia and Canada.
Tutoring service for top university application and interview is another service attracting more students. Joining HOPE UK office, the company recruited and partnered with more tutors and specialized institutions overseas to expand the online tutoring service from subject training to Oxbridge ang G5 universities application. This service has been particularly popular among students of international schools in China.
Teacher training. Apart from jointly organizing school link forums, HOPE has been working more closely with local education bureau, local education associations to provide teacher training with its educational resource both at home and abroad. HOPE's service also extended to helping Chinese institutions to recruit international students overseas. In November, HOPE organized Westlake University, a top research university in Hangzhou, visited several UK schools for recruitment. Similarly, HOPE's service expanded to parents of HOPE students. An in-depth UK culture tour/camp is being designed for next year after two domestic excursions for parents were organized in 2024.
Innovative events. Traditional marketing and promotion events such as education fairs can hardly attract good number of clients now with so many similar events in the market. HOPE has been innovative in designing and organizing more cost-effective and innovative events to promote our partner institutions. For example, School Link Forum followed by School and Summer/Winter Camp Fair was a practical and influential event HOPE organized in October 2024. With 11 schools from UK, Singapore, Malaysia and 32 schools from China, the forum provided an excellent opportunity for in-depth discussion on partnership and good chance for profile raising and networking. While the Fair held in Shanghai Municipal Children's Palace combined Parents' Class, panel discussion and individual counselling, attracting 110 families to attend.
Another event proved to be both innovative and influential was the carnival for autism children held in Shanghai Botanical Garden in March just before the ‘World Autism Awareness Day’ with over 400 students, parents, partner UK and Chinese institutions representatives, local government representatives joining. Such type of charity events for autism children have been carefully designed and organized by HOPE, local autism rehabilitation centre and local government for many years. Charity walk and cycling, photography contest, exhibition, auction sales, camps, donation, all those events showcased the participants and HOPE's social responsibilities as well as their love and care to the autism children and their families. More and more our overseas partner institutions such as Loughborough University, University of Southampton, not only joined the events but also donated teaching and sports equipment or sponsored part of the events.
Inviting visiting academic staff from overseas institutions to local international schools to conduct master classes, and organizing students and parents to visit UK returned alumnus' companies were also welcomed by many of our institutional and individual clients.
Sustainable development. It is substantially important to establish a healthy eco-environment of the industry if a bigger market needs to grow. Agent-institution relationship and agent-agent/sub-agent relationship are vital to this environment. HOPE has been leading to build this healthy environment by organizing and sponsoring 2-3 education conference and study tour in China each year, and in 2024, such event even included tour to institutions in Singapore and Malaysia as well! Discussing the hot topics in international education, proposing the solutions to the challenges all are facing, promoting partnership and collaboration are main purposes HOPE wants to achieve for a sustainable development of the industry.
The year 2025 will witness HOPE's 25th anniversary. Although more challenges are ahead for HOPE and the whole industry, the company will continue to make its contribution towards international education exchange and collaboration as well as students mobility domestically and globally.
