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..