23 January 2015

At the 2015 National Education Work Conference was in Beijing, China’s Education Minister Yuan Guiren delivered a speech outlining the country’s nine key priorities for the education sector in 2015. Deepening education reform was identified as the year’s “core theme”, while enhancing fairness and quality were described as the two strategic core tasks.

A list of these priorities is given below. The 7th key area – “deepening international exchanges and cooperation” – is directly linked to education internationalisation.

1. Studying and implementing the spirit of speeches by Chinese President Xi Jinping.
2. Including core values of socialism in teaching programs, textbooks, exams, and student evaluations.
3. Putting more effort into promoting fairness in education, narrowing the gap between rural and urban education, and reducing the dropout rate of compulsory education.
4. Adjusting the structure of the education system and improving the quality of education to address the talents needed for economic development. Examples include developing modern vocational education and further/lifelong education, transforming provincial general universities into applied technology universities, and improving innovation in education.
5. Making breakthroughs in education reform, including deepening the reform of provincial education authorities and higher education institutions; accelerating reform of the examination system and enrolment (the ministry has urged all local educational bureaus to report their reform plans to the ministry by 30 June 2015); and promoting reform of the model of talent cultivation.
6. Promoting the rule of law in education and school administration.
7. Deepening international exchanges and cooperation in the education field. This includes improving both overseas study work and services, improving work on attracting overseas students to China, improving the quality of China-foreign cooperative programs, and improving talent cultivation and joint research for China’s internationalisation.
8. Exploring ways to raise funds for education and improve the efficiency of education spending.
9. Strengthening the construction of the Chinese Communist Party, including anti-corruption work in the education system.

Specific policies related to enhancing international cooperation will be drawn up in a three-year work plan on overseas studies in 2015; one aim of this plan is to develop more speakers of less common languages. Other relevant goals include training talents who work in cutting-edge fields, international organizations and regional studies; although China plays an important role in international organisations like the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the World Bank, there are currently few Chinese employees in these organisations. The Ministry of Education will select students that show the most potential and fund them to study overseas.

Analysis by Liu Jing, Assistant Director Education Marketing

 Echoing President Xi Jinping’s speeches, the inward and outward mobility of students, quality of TNE programs and joint research were included again as key tasks for the internationalisation of education in China. The policy environment is favourable for the overseas study market in general. Courses related to international organisations such as the UN and regional studies would attract extra support and attention from Chinese authorities and institutions.
 Joint research in fields where UK institutions have particular strengths would be a good model of partnership with high profile/elite universities, regardless of the ranking of the UK institutions. This would raise the institution’s profile which would eventually have an effect on recruitment.
 There will be stricter quality review and control on TNE programmes, to ensure that China is really introducing high quality overseas education resources and protecting students’ welfare.

Source: http://www.moe.gov.cn/publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/moe/moe_1485/20150…

Please direct any queries about the China market to liu.jing@britishcouncil.org.cn.