Discussion keeps the world's turning.
This is Roundtable. You're listening to Roundtable.
I'm Ha Young. We're excited to delve into the recent developments in China's education sector.
Over the past decade, China has made significant strides in increasing access to education and enhancing educational equality.
Despite ongoing challenges such as resource and opportunity disparities, China's dedication to improving educational access and quality remains evident.
With us, for this discussion, our Limehane, known for his keen insights, welcome back to the show.
Hello. And we have a special guest, Clementine Ebel, a strategic consultant at Venture Education who has a comprehensive understanding of both education systems in China and the UK.
Welcome to Roundtable.
Thank you. It's great to join.
It's great to have you via the internet.
Together we'll explore the effects of educational reform and the valuable lessons we can learn from each other's experiences.
Clementine, do briefly introduce yourself and your background in education for us?
Sure. So, I've been involved in China's education system for the past seven years, starting with my own education consultancy back in 27 in Shanghai, where I was creating original programs and curriculum.
I then joined Chengdu Westmasters School project, which was setting up an international school in Chengdu.
And then since then, I've been supporting the research team at Margaret Intelligence Company Venture Education, which you just mentioned.
What has really stood out to you about the different approaches to education in China and the UK?
Yeah. So, China does have a unique education system and that is partly because of its unique trajectory.
It's historic changes that have happened recently.
So, obviously, it really took off in the 1970s, so that makes it a relatively new and constantly evolving system.
So, that is the first very big difference, is that it is constantly reforming, changing and improving.
I would say in relative terms, the UK education system is much more static.
So, whether that's in terms of the school system itself, private schools and state schools, they remain much more predictable, I would say.
So that is one very, very core difference.
But then the educational values that are being promoted are also very distinct.
So, in the UK and the US, the focus is really on holistic education.
So, this is focusing on individual growth, overall growth across arts, sports, emotional development as well.
In China, the education system focuses on academic attainment and that is really shown in the very strong foundation that students across the country achieve.
But increasingly also this emphasis on vocational education, which has really been a very big driver under seeding plan.
You don't see this vocational push in the same way in the UK.
So, these are a few pretty big differences and in the future, I think we'll see more of this vocational development in China, which might distinguish it further from countries in the West.
That's very king observation on your part, clementing and that is, yes, China's education system has been going on through a lot of evolutions and reforms over the past few decades.
And we had to go through this because we started with very modest beginnings.
In the year 1949, the average years of education in this country was about 1.6 years.
So you can imagine the illiteracy rate among Chinese population.
And by 2018, the average years of education that Chinese people have to go through is about 10.6 years.
So that's a long way to go.
And also in the very near few decades, for instance, in the year 1990, China was going to reduce the illiteracy rate among its population by 50%.
Back then, the illiteracy rate was 22.23%.
And then look at what we are now in the year 2018, the consolidation rate for our nine-year compulsory education was about 94.2%.
So that was a drastic move forward.
As such, we can imagine that a lot of changes have to take place, a lot of infrastructure building, a lot of management techniques and a lot of talent cultivation will have to be pushed forward in order for us to be where we are currently.
Oh, yes. And the latest figure stated by the Minister of Education Huai Jin Pung at the CPC Central Committee press conference on July 19 says that China has built the world's largest education system.
On average, newcomers to the job market now have 14 years of schooling under their belts.
What's more, a staggering 250 million people in China have completed some form of higher education or equivalent.
And while that scale of education in China is impressive, what measures are being taken to ensure quality and standards?
There are some major challenges.
China's rapid growth has in many ways been a success story, particularly in terms of literacy, the improvements in literacy, and students going to school.
But with such a fast growth, it's very challenging for the legal system to catch up, and as you just said, to ensure quality and standards.
What we see at venture education is we are dealing with 15 new policies on average every two months.
That is a huge number of policies.
And a lot of those are to try and improve the standards of education.
So there are constant measures in place, but that also makes it very challenging for schools to adapt to those changes and having previously been involved in setting up schools in China.
You see how important it is for the school staff to stay on top of those changes, whether that's quality or whether that's implementing new standards and regulation.
So that is both a positive thing, but also a huge challenge for schools.
An example I would give about quality and standards is from last year there have been many several scandals about teacher quality in China and sort of misconduct amongst teaching staff in schools and universities.
Now the government were very quick to respond to that problem, and they have introduced measures to improve recruitment standards.
And they are implementing those, they implemented those last year around summer time and those are continuing to develop.
So that's an example where they're trying to tighten industry standards in response to a very specific kind of news phenomenon.
Yeah, so that's one example there.
Right, and also to improve the quality of education, I think the first step is to make sure that people receive education, people have access to education to begin with, which is why I remember as a kid in the 1980s and 90s, I remember a huge promotion of campaign even in a small county-wide grew up about compulsory education and introducing to people how important it is for parents to send their kids to school and how it is free and how it is illegal not to comply with the state regulation, that kind of thing.
So it was one of the steps.
And then going forward over time, I think the education system has to adapt to changes in the way we organize our lives.
For instance, in the past few decades, we talk about this huge diaspora of people who travel from rural areas to more developed, for instance, coastal regions in Southeast China, where there are plenty of more opportunities, then that creates a lot of challenges in terms of whether their kids are traveling with them.
And if they do, do they have access to education locally where they are staying with the parenting cities?
That proved to be a huge problem for a while until the authorities really did what they had to to try and facilitate the growing demand for children to go to school in urban areas.
That's one of the changes that we have to adapt to.
And then with regard to the shortage of staff, that is an ongoing effort.
I think starting from the 1995, the year, mid-1990s, the policy of Zhijiao or aid in education on the part of Yang volunteers and Yang college kids was started.
And so very ambitious and very compassionate, Yang people of this country are being encouraged to go to the less developed part of the country where there is a very significant shortage of teaching staff for them to feel the vacancy.
Even if it's just a while for a few years, or some of them might choose to stay longer, there are plenty of examples of them choosing to stay for their entire career.
But that was another way, another attempt to try and feel the gap between the supply and demand of teaching staff in different parts of this country.
Yes, and you're alluding to what the situation has been in the rural areas.
And it's important to have the right teachers, the right people in the posts, and to there to disseminate knowledge and part information, as well as being the architects of the soul to a large extent.
And not only are we seeing that in rural areas, but even in urban settings where we assume that the teaching resources are far more abundant, and still we're seeing changes to sort of even in these urban districts to even out to improve the teaching resources as well, and offering these policies which allow outstanding teachers to go to different schools and to teach in different kinds of schools.
And this was unheard of when I was in primary school in China.
So we're seeing all kinds of policies being rolled out.
And also China has implemented rigorous teacher training programs and updating their curricula to focus on core competencies and continued financial investment in education, as we've seen that there's above 4% GDP allocation annually to the education sector.
As we reflect on the progress in education, I'm interested in an understanding of the understanding how educational equity has been pursued.
How has a resource allocation been handled to balance the needs of schools from different areas, regions, and particularly between urban and rural communities, and liming you've touched upon part of it, which is very important that is sending out the teaching talent to these places where otherwise maybe folks don't necessarily go to.
Right, so we mentioned earlier how important it was for the nation and for the population to really address the issue of teacher shortage, especially in less developed parts of the region.
And we mentioned the policy of Zhijiao or volunteer teachers who would travel to the rural areas to be as teachers for a period of time.
And also there are efforts dedicated into training teachers who might choose to start their career in the rural areas.
There are there being plenty of experiments, but we know that they face huge challenges.
One of the challenges arises from the economic gap between urban areas and rural areas.
We often see that the more developed region is, the more resources it may have, invest into their education system.
And by that logic, you could assume that a teacher who works in urban areas might stand to make a lot more money as compared to one that works in the rural areas.
So it's really hard to convince teachers to stay for longer term at such their experiments into this problem.
And there are findings that, for instance, if there are oriented programs where young folks or college students have been enrolled, they are probably funded under certain policies or projects.
And under the promise that when they graduate, they will need to serve at particular regions of the country, most likely less advanced and less developed parts of the country.
So the nation has been trying very hard to address and work around the issue of teachers shortage.
And another way, thanks to the advancement in technology, another way to work around this is to try and boost connectivity over the internet.
And I remember there was one trip during which I went to Guizhou, in South West China, which is a very mountainous, very remote part of the country.
And there was this school that I went to.
And the principal told me that, well, we have all the facilities.
We have all the hardware, the computers and the internet connection.
We worry about the shortage of staff still.
But again, I think with the facilities and with the connectivity in place, it is now possible to bypass some of the problems.
One of the major programs that the Ministry of Education is pushing this year is to try and promote basic education, high quality courses.
And what they do is they send a message to all schools and districts across the country and asking for high end or high quality online courses to be made so that they can be shared in the system, in the system of smartadu.cn, which is a smart platform that everybody has access to.
I'd registered for the platform last night.
I could register as a parent.
And once registered, I could have access to many of the courses.
In fact, all of the courses offer for free on that platform.
So I imagine for children in rural areas, even as they suffer from shortage of staff in the teaching faculty, the technology that they can rely on to solve some of the problems that they are facing.
Yeah, I think there are a few points I would add quickly.
So I think one is at a fundamental level, the government have acknowledged the difference in economic backgrounds and therefore educational attainment between different provinces in China.
And therefore they have different acceptance rates for universities.
That is a very big difference and something that I haven't seen in the UK, in the US, the acceptance of lower schools in the Galkar from top universities to encourage students from different provinces to apply for those top universities.
One area that we're seeing the government pushed at a pretty successful scale was I think it was back in 2011, there was the introduction of free school meals that was pushed out across the country.
This is an interesting policy because it's a very hotly debated topic in the UK as well.
The provision of free school meals that people feel very passionately should exist, should be provided.
So this has been on the agenda in China for the past for over 10 years.
So that's another big area I would say.
The free meal on campus really was a big game changer.
I personally have seen with my own eyes my classmates in junior middle school who have to bring their own rice and some pickled vegetables to the campus because they were boarding and so they don't get to travel back home on a daily basis.
So they have to bring their own stuff, their own food to the campus and they couldn't cook for themselves.
They have to make use of the school cafeteria.
Like when they start boiling or cooking they just bring a bowl of raw rice to the cooking utensils and then after school they have access to that but it was very simple meals and so in comparison if the school were to provide, in fact they are providing free meals then that would drastically improve the health conditions of students who are quoting such a terrible situation.
Yeah so kids, young people come to school not only for nourishment of the mind but also physically as well and Clementine.
Your research has involved analyzing data and comparing the perspectives of Chinese and British parents on education.
What key differences have you observed particularly regarding educational anxiety and expectations?
How has it understood that parents from both countries want their children to do well in school?
How do their approaches and levels of concern differ?
Absolutely, they are quite different and that is largely because the population of China is obviously far larger and therefore the pressure is exerted on parents and students are also greater.
So for Chinese parents education is prioritized essentially above everything else when we carried out research into what the biggest concerns or biggest priorities biggest hopes for parents are in China.
When we amalgamated the answers through AI we discovered that Chinese parents the three things were good grades, constant improvement and remaining patriotic.
These are pretty different to what we would see if we carried that out in the UK.
So when we asked foreign parents in China what they said the response was finding strength within themselves so they can lead themselves and others.
So they are independent, happy, healthy and capable.
So there is a desire you are absolutely right for all parents to see their students achieve their academic potential.
This is still a priority shared by all parents I believe across the world but returning to my point earlier the focus is on holistic growth in the UK and amongst foreign parents.
They are emphasizing social, emotional as well as academic attainment or improvement.
Whereas for the Chinese parents quite rightly under this competitive system they know that the grades is what is going to enable students to get into those top universities and get a good job.
So different values reflecting different societal pressures or a different societal environment.
Just as it is important to improve the educational infrastructure and also the quality of service that schools are able to provide.
It is also important for parents to have more mature or up-to-date understanding about education and I think perhaps a decade or two decades ago if you ask my parents they would value the access to education opportunities much more above anything else.
But now with more mature understanding with better educational background in our generation I think it is much easier for people of my generation to identify with parents in the UK or in any other more developed countries.
We know that when access to education is can be taken for granted when you are sure that as long as your kid works hard he or she will end up in an appropriate education institution for them to lift up to their potentials then our attention can be shifted to whether he or she is happy where they are, whether he or she is living up to their fullest potentials whether parents and society are exerting too much pressure on them.
So I think the improvement of the country's education system perhaps lies also in the improvement of parents awareness about what kind of education system, what kind of pressure or impact that the current system is having on the children.
Yes and I suppose the cultural attitudes towards education here in China some may argue is deeply rooted in the traditional confusions.
Confucius. Confucius.
It's a deep acceptance of pragmatism and it emphasizes respect for learning, hard work and academic achievement.
And this cultural backdrop leads to high levels of motivation among students to excel academically.
However this could also result in significant stress and a narrow definition of success.
How do educational partnerships between China and other countries contribute to cultural exchange and mutual understanding?
Yeah, educational partnership is fundamental both for the political, economic and social health of country-to-country relationships.
There are still strong educational partnerships in China between China and countries in the West so we have previously seen big scale partnerships from school franchises to sort of a university joint partnerships.
We are still seeing cooperation but at maybe a smaller or more specific scale.
So we're seeing teacher to student exchanges, international education conferences, international professors are still being welcomed by Chinese universities.
So educational partnership is still very much there.
It's just it's changed forms slightly but I think it is essential particularly for student to student exchange to continue if we are hoping to develop greater understanding, greater empathy between countries.
So I have previously benefited from the Yen Cheng programme at Beda at Peaking University and in that programme you know over 100 students come from all over the world to do a two-year programme in which they understand China better from a historical cultural literary perspective, language perspective and it doesn't matter whether they absolutely love China or whether they're just interested in China, they develop a deeper understanding of that country and when they go home or when they continue their journeys in China they have better dialogue with Chinese people and they can hopefully path that onto other individuals.
So that student to student exchange is fundamental and there is still not enough of it.
Yes and here's the last question for you Clementine.
As someone who's been immersed in both the Chinese and British education systems, what is your biggest takeaway?
Yeah it's a big question and a difficult one to choose a single or biggest takeaway but I would say that the two systems or at a larger scale Chinese educational system and Western educational model they have so much to learn from one another.
They are very different but both have their benefits and have their weaknesses and I think the continued learning, continued exchange between the two is absolutely vital.
China's education system provides a very very strong academic foundation, basic fundamental academic abilities to their students.
However at a higher level the provision of overall education standards is less strong.
Mostly in the UK model sometimes that foundation is not there, it's not as strong as the Chinese system but we provide opportunities across science, across arts, across sport.
And so I think combining what is excellent in what the best practices in both systems to make both systems stronger is my biggest takeaway, the potential there for improvement on both sides.
Yes, perhaps most importantly through this conversation we've been reminded that education is our most powerful tool for building mutual understanding and respect across cultures.
As we wrap up this enlightening discussion on education reform from international perspectives I'd like to extend my heartfelt thanks to our panelists, Lyme and Clementine Ebel.
It's been a great conversation thanks a lot.
That brings us to the end of today's show, let's continue to invest in education to learn from each other and through which we foster a more interconnected and understanding world.
You can find us on Apple Podcast at Roundtable China.
I'm Ha Young. We'll see you next time.
