AN unlicensed vocational school in Longgang District has changed its name four times over the past two years in order to recruit new students, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported Friday.

A parent, surnamed Li, said that her child was enrolled at the school, which was named “Guangdong Industry and Trade College Shenzhen School” last year. But soon after enrollment, the school changed its name four times and Li became worried that the school was operating illegally.

The school is located in a technology park in Longgang District. According to the spokesperson of the technology park’s property management company, the school is unlicensed, and failed fire-control inspections by the district’s fire department in March. It was fined 30,000 yuan (US$4,407) and ordered to suspend classes by the authorities, but the school was still in operation as of last week.

According to a paper issued by the fire department, the school doesn’t have a fire-control administrative license and there is a factory on the fourth floor of the school’s main building, meaning that the building is for both industrial and commercial use.

According to the education bureau in Longgang District, the school is jointly run by a culture company registered in Luohu District and the Guangdong Industry and Trade College, a public vocational school in Foshan City.

The valid period of the agreement signed by both sides to co-run the school was from October 2012 to January 2015, and the school was located in Luohu District before moving to Longgang in December 2015. After the agreement expired, the company illegally re-enrolled 381 students under the name of the college in September 2015 without getting the college’s permission.

As these 381 students were not legally registered, the college signed a memorandum with the company March 14 last year and agreed to enroll the students into the college.

The students could choose to continue studying at the college in Foshan or drop out. The company agreed to refund tuition payments to the students who decided to drop out, but the company was no longer allowed to recruit students in the name of the college, according to the memorandum.

However, the Longgang education bureau found that there were 279 students studying at the school last month while there should have only been 203 students according to the list of names provided by the college. Further investigation showed that the school had illegally enrolled another 76 students by using two different names last year.

The bureau is urging law enforcement departments in the district to shut down the school as it doesn’t have the permit required to run a school or a fire-control administrative license.

The bureau has also reached out to the college for a solution, and the college agreed to arrange for the students at the school to continue their education at the college in Foshan.

The school’s spokesperson, surnamed Zhang, said that the school hasn’t enrolled students since 2016 under the name of any school.

A staffer at the school, surnamed Wei, said there were around 270 students at the school and most of them were registered at Guangdong Industry and Trade College and nearly 10 students were registered at other schools because they were rejected by the college.

Wei said that the company had applied to the city’s human resources and social security bureau to run a vocational school in November last year and received a pre-approval paper, but the application was rejected because the company didn’t have the credentials for a fire-control license.

(Zhang Yang)