After five years of following the State Mid-term Educational Reform and Development Plan (2010-2020), China’s compulsory education has seen great results, including spreading the 9-year compulsory education across the nation, and balancing its development.
This level of 9-year compulsory education reached only one year after the plan was implemented, so, since 2011, all school-age children have equal educational opportunities, marking a historic moment for China’s more than 1.3 billion people and putting it in first place out of nine developing countries taking part in the Millennium Development Goals of the UN and the Dakar Framework 2000 universal education goal.
China increased financing for its central and western regions to narrow the educational gap between various areas and did more to renovate rural junior schools in central and western areas and improve the education level in minority regions. The government has improved rural education and related rural support, rural student nutrition, and enrollments in poor areas, to narrow the urban - rural gap.
Local governments have tried to balance the development of compulsory education by school districts and collectivizing schools, make full use of quality education resources, and try to improve the educational level of poorly performing schools, to better balance compulsory education development at the county level.
The nation wants to achieve the following: financial aid for students from poorer families that covers everyone from preschoolers to postgraduates; more comprehensive special education; more education opportunities for people with disabilities; get migrant workers’ children into local educational systems, and provide financial support for them; do more to help children in rural areas left at home by their parents.
The children of China now enjoy more opportunities to enter school and can seek equal opportunity to a quality education, and now that compulsory education has become more wide-spread, it’s time to improve the quality of education in a balanced overall way. The United Nations Sustainable Development Summit for 2015 reached an agreement among 193 state members and proposed the “Change our world - 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Education” and the “2030 Framework for Action by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization” to improve the quality of education as its goal. At the 18th Party Central Committee 5th Plenary Session, they approved a proposal on improved education quality as a way to lead education reforms.
Tao Xiping, a member of the national education advisory committee.
