Press Releases

Chen Baosheng attends G20 Education Minister Virtual Meeting

Source: www.moe.gov.cn
2020-06-29

On June 27, G20 education ministers convened a virtual extraordinary meeting under the presidency of Saudi Arabia. At the invitation of Saudi Arabia’s Education Ministry, China’s education minister Chen Baosheng attended the meeting and introduced China’s experience in minimizing the impact of the COVID-19 on its education system.

Chen said that through the concerted efforts of the entire nation under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, China had established a long-term prevention and control mechanism with businesses restarting their operations and education institutions reopening on an increasingly larger scale. Chen noted that China’s education ministry always put the health and life safety of 280 million students and 17 million teachers in the first place and had taken strict measures in coordinating outbreak prevention and school resumption.

He further introduced specific measures that the ministry had taken in three aspects. At the very beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, the ministry promptly decided to postpone the 2020 spring semester, thus effectively containing the spread of the epidemic on campuses, had made tremendous efforts in protecting Chinese students studying overseas and also provided strong support to international students and foreign teachers in China. To sustain educational continuity, it initiated the nationwide “studying at home” campaign by mobilizing resources from governments at different levels, schools, enterprises and social groups. In pushing forward school reopening, it issued clear guidance to ensure schools in different regions reopen and classes of different grades restart in an orderly manner.

Chen recommended several measures that G20 education ministers could adopt to improve their education systems’ capacity for coping with current and future crises: a) enhancing international cooperation through multilateral platforms for sharing of good practices in outbreak control; b) increasing application of AI-related and other new technologies in education; c) strengthening international cooperation in supporting vulnerable groups by addressing the digital divide and inequality in learning opportunities, so as to ensure open, inclusive and balanced educational development across the world.

As part of the efforts to implement the outcome of the G20 Extraordinary Leaders’ Summit on COVID-19, this meeting invited education ministers of G20 members and some other countries, and leaders of international organizations such as OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank to share good practices and successful stories of different countries in combatting COVID-19 in their education systems. The meeting resulted in a ministerial statement, which showed the determination of G20 countries to join hands in coping with the pandemic.