Making the right choices

In addition to the service industry and child care, Cao says China's IT and engineering fields also need vocational education investment, because skilled technicians in these fields will strengthen China's manufacturing and advanced engineering productivity.

He says the best example is China's automotive industry, where automakers are finding it difficult to staff dealership networks with highly skilled technicians who also have strong professional ethics.

Consequently, customers sometimes need to send their cars back to dealerships for repair several times just to fix a simple fault. As a result many foreign cars such as Jaguar Land Rover are priced three times more in China than in the UK, so that the companies' can recover the costs, he says.

"In a good UK auto dealership, technicians would mostly fix small problems in just one attempt. In very rare situations, they would need two attempts, and almost never three," Cao says.

"But in China, it is common for customers to return the cars to dealerships three or four, or even five times, just to fix the same issue. So training skilled technicians can greatly save costs," he says.

Warwickshire College expanded into mainland in 2012, with the launch of a vocational college in Qingzhou city, Shandong province, in partnership with the Chinese vocational education provider Weifang Engineering Vocational College and Beijing Guozheng International Education Investment Co Ltd.

Known as the China-UK National Skills College, the college aims to provide British style vocational education, which places emphasis on hands-on experience and entrepreneurship, Cao says.

This September, the China-UK National Skills College will see its first intake of students, with its first courses focusing on early childhood education.