Summary:

China's Ministry of Education has recently signed a memorandum for the further development of art education at school level with eight provinces and cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Fujian, Shandong, Chongqing, Sichuan and Gansu. One of the priority areas for this development is to strengthen capacity building for primary and secondary level art teachers, in order to solve a current shortage of these teachers.

According to the MoU, China’s Ministry of Education will give policy support to these eight provinces and cities in several areas. These include general reform of art education in schools, research into pedagogy in this field, construction of schools and bases for conserving Chinese outstanding traditional culture and art heritage, development of experimental areas for evaluating the artistic quality of primary and secondary school students, innovation in talent cultivation and training in Higher Education Institutes, international exchange and cooperation in art education, the construction of rural experimental art schools in western areas of the country, and the training of art teachers in rural areas.

According to analysis recently published by the China Association for Promotion of Art Education (CCPAE) and China Data Centre (CDC) of Tsinghua University, the number of teachers teaching art in China’s primary and secondary schools was 599,000 in 2015, an increase of 200,000 over 10 years earlier, with a student-teacher ratio of 234:1. However, the report says that the total number of art teachers in China is still below that needed, particularly in central and western areas of the country. To enable all provinces to meet the minimum standards for teaching art modules in schools, China still needs to add around 46,000 new art teachers.

Sources:
1. http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_xwfb/gzdt_gzdt/moe_1485/201608/t20160829_27700...
2. http://www.jyb.cn/china/gnxw/201608/t20160830_670624.html