Big year ahead for China’s education sector
Posted Under: Chinese Education Policy, Chinese Students, Education System, High School, Kindergarten, Primary School, Private Schooling, University, Vocational Education
The team at China Education Blog wish you a happy Chinese new year! May this year of the Ox see you in good health, happiness and prosperity. As we have just launched this blog, we hope to keep you informed of the most important Chinese education sector movements over the coming year.
And a big year it promises to be. Currently in a drafting phase, 2009 will see the Chinese government releasing further details about the country’s 12-year plan for education, a document that will provide policy directives to almost every cog within China’s education system through until the year 2020.
Totuba analyst Fransisca Zhang explains, “The 12-year plan will look at what has been done in the past and determine what should be improved or tweaked for Chinese education in the future. The main objectives include the outlining of strategies and policies to improve the overall quality of education delivered, sweeping plans for the development of education at different levels, identifying the most important areas for reform, and improving the regulatory conditions for the development of the education sector.”
It is expected that the 12-year plan will have a heavy focus on the improvement of education faccess for the country’s 800 million rural dwellers, in line with the government’s recent announcement on massive public healthcare funding.
Zhang continues, “The government plans to overhaul the entire system, starting with compulsory education curricula, improving rural access to education to spread prosperity to the masses, further development of the vocational training sector in line with changing workforce needs, and reforming the higher education system to produce more competitive and workforce-ready graduates.”
Announcing further details of the 12-year plan, Premier Wen Jiabao suggested that, “Teachers should teach students to think, live and get along with others, in addition to knowledge,” highlighting China’s (and much of the rest of Asia’s) typically regimented teaching methods. Exactly how this will be achieved on such a large scale, and with teachers whose style and methods have been ingrained over many years, remains to be seen.
We expect opportunities for foreign experts and educational organisations across many areas of the forthcoming 12-year plan. If you would like to know more, The China Education Blog will be tracking its progress in the prevailing months.
In the meantime, we wish you the best of luck in the year of the Ox!
Reader Comments
It is quite important to overview what we have achieved in the past and to think the future of our education system. Especially in such tough economic environment, the opportunity of employment for graduate students is a hot topic among our graduate students.On one hand, the company need the candidates with working experience, on the other hand, the graduate students don’t have access to the job vacant for the lack of working experience.It seems that we are dominated by the rules of Catch-22.