On the 30th October, the Ministry of Education announced its plans to create the national foreign language proficiency examination system, which will be the first such system in China. It has been reported that the system will cover all levels of schooling and the comprehensive abilities of listening, speaking, reading, writing, as well as foreign language learning, teaching and testing. The Ministry of Education expressed a keen desire to create a domestic standardised system for measuring foreign language ability, as there is currently confusion surrounding how to compare the many different types of English tests that are available against each other. The planned launch of this new framework is in 2017.