Migrant children face tighter admission rules(2)

Lack of resources

But education authorities said they have their own difficulties.

According to a Beijing People's Broadcasting Station report, the heads of the Haidian and Changping district education bureaus said their districts' educational resources cannot meet the needs of all the new schoolchildren this year.

About 176,000 children are expected to enter primary school in Beijing this year, 10,000 more than in 2013, said Xian Lianping, head of the Beijing Education Commission.

Xian told the radio station that all school-going children can be admitted based on the calculated educational resources in the city. But he did not say whether migrant children are included in the calculation.

One of the scholars who signed the appeal, Tian Feilong, a lecturer of law at Beihang University, said it is possible that the change of admission policy is due to the limited number of vacancies in Beijing's schools.

"The policy can be a short-term measure to solve the problem in 2014, but it cannot be used all the time," Tian said.

Liu Lianjun, an associate professor of law at Hangzhou Normal University, said the families of migrants who work in low-end industries will be the hardest hit by the tighter policy.

"Those parents have very low incomes and cannot afford private schools, and they don't have strong social networks to help solve their children's enrollment difficulties," Liu said.

"The only solution for them is to send their children back to their hometowns to live with their grandparents, who don't have enough time to take care of them because many have to work on the farm."