IN A darkened school auditorium, two hippy guitarists are belting out the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever to a crowd of excited children.

It’s a fun social-studies class on the music of the 1960s, the children dressed up in tie-dyed T-shirts and headbands, the musicians Paul and Clifton, two willing parents.

It could be any school in England, but step outside and you are confronted by the towering skyscrapers and teeming streets of Pudong, Shanghai’s ultra-modern, fast-growing business district.

The concert is at Dulwich College — not the south London public school that educated PG Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler, but its latest international offshoot, Dulwich College International School, Shanghai.

The school, a bell tower-topped red-brick building set back from green playing fields, is a miniature version of the original. It opened 18 months ago and already has 550 pupils and a 400-strong waiting list with parents eager to pay as much as $21,400 (£11,450) a year in fees.

In the administrative offices, downstairs from where pupils are now lustily singing John Lennon’s Imagine, a nervous- looking father from New Zealand, an expatriate worker in Shanghai, sits filling out application forms; another parent has just rung up trying to jump the queue by claiming to be a friend of Tony Blair.

Colin Niven, the avuncular master, is a Dulwich College old boy who once taught Blair at Fettes College, Edinburgh. From the roof of the building he points out the nearby Ducks school, an affiliate that caters for children up to five, and shows off land earmarked for an expansion that will double the school’s size.

A veteran of international schools — he ran them in Hong Kong and Rome — he is taken aback by the rapid growth and strong demand for the Dulwich brand of education in China. “The response has been fantastic,” he said.

Dulwich is one of a group of educational institutions cashing in on Asia’s thirst for English-style education. It has for several years run a franchised school in Phuket, Thailand, and plans four schools in China through an exclusive franchise agreement with a group of British, Chinese and Thai investors.

As well as Shanghai, Dulwich will have colleges in Beijing (slated for full opening in September), Suzhou and one other location. Lord George, the former governor of the Bank of England who is chairman of the Dulwich board of governors, sits on the board of the Chinese group.

Other public schools and universities are moving east. Harrow and Shrewsbury College have offshoots in Bangkok, with Harrow planning to open in Beijing in September.

The University of Nottingham has a campus in Malaysia, and last year scored a coup by opening the first foreign university campus in China, at Ningbo.

Cambridge is overseeing Beijing’s English-language teaching programmes in preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games.

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