Chen and Liang (2007) find that the total cost of attending primary school in Beijing ranges from approximately 3,500 to 6,000 yuan per year, or roughly 40–60 per cent of average migrant family yearly earnings. Migrant children also face discrimination and ridicule by local classmates and suffer from a sense of inferiority (Irwin 2000; Zhang and Zhao 2003). Schooling in their home Hukou has been a popular choice, but with the longer lengths of parent’s stays in the host destination, the preference for this option declines (Chen and Liang 2007). Migrant-sponsored schools on the other hand are not part of the formal school system but serve as functional alternatives. While they charge lower overall fees with flexible payment plans and provide after-school programs while migrant parents may still be at work, their drawbacks include poor quality facilities and a lack of qualified teachers (Chen and Liang 2007). The general attitude of the government to these schools earlier on was ‘do not ban, do not recognise, let it run its course’ in the hope they would gradually die out (Kwong 2004; Liu 2012), but this never happened..