The number of international students in ACT public schools has increased by 16 per cent since the start of the year with Chinese students leading the charge.
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Another 108 students from 19 countries joined Canberra's schools in semester two pushing the count up to 516 students.
Of those students 292 were from China and Vietnam had the second-highest number of students with 39 then Korea with 37 and Saudi Arabia 26.
Dickson College student Nina Wang, 17, is from a town in Zhejiang province in southern China and has been in Canberra for a year.
She said she likes the "peace and quiet" the city offers. "Canberra is a safe city, with a good environment. At high school in China, we have lots of classes in one day, 12 hours a day, every day except for Sunday," Ms Wang said.
One of Dickson's international student coordinators, Tabatha Kellett, said Ms Wang was doing well at the college. "She is a quiet student with a lot going on upstairs. She is doing really well academically and has a lot of friends," Ms Kellett said.
Ms Wang boards with an Australian couple, a firefighter and a nurse with four grown-up children. She has a home-stay sister – another Chinese student who boards with the couple and attends another Canberra high school.
She said she misses her parents, and her mother was visiting again next week after a visit in December last year.
Home-stay families receive a $280-a-week allowance for looking after the students and are in constant contact with the international student coordinators at the schools.
Ms Kellett said the students were boosting multicultural exchange for Canberra's schools.
She has visited China twice with an ACT government delegation and said visiting Chinese high schools and meeting the parents of Dickson students was eye-opening.
Ms Kellett said parents she talked to who had never been to Australia were "trying to imagine their child's whole day" in the ACT system with significantly fewer face-to-face teaching hours than China.
International students are spaced out between Canberra schools and make up 2 to 5 per cent of each school's population.