Child-focused international development agency, Plan, will in May start rolling out a training programme for pre-school teachers in ten counties of Shaanxi Province in a bid to support local government efforts in what is becoming a new frontier for rural education.

Children from poor families are expected to enjoy greatly improved access to schooling as a result of the central government’s recent decision to waive “miscellaneous” fees for nine years of compulsory education in rural areas. However, China’s countryside lags far behind the cities in pre-school provision, which is known to improve educational performance in later years.

According to a study published in 2006 by UNICEF and the Office the National Working Committee on Children and Women, a mere 1.3% of total government expenditure on education is spend on pre-school education. “Whereas cities, especially in eastern China, have high levels of pre-school enrolment, the pre-school enrolment rate in still very low in rural areas,” the study finds.

Plan has six years’ experience of supporting pre-school education in Shaanxi. Their work in this field began in 2001 with a small, pilot project, funded by the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAid), that supported the development of 30 village-level “family kindergartens” in five counties where the international NGO has long-term community development programmes (Pucheng [蒲城县], Chunhua [淳化县], Jia [佳县], Yuyang [榆林市榆阳区] and Xixiang [西乡县]).

In this early stage, Plan and local Women’s Federation branches sought to build on informal child care arrangements by identifying capable village women who were already looking after children from other families, and then providing them with equipment, training in pre-school education approaches and training in basic hygiene and primary health care so as to ensure the safety of the children.

However, according to Plan’s Rural Education Programme Manager, Gao Guangshen (高广深), it is hard for local education authorities officially to recognise and licence family-run kindergartens because doing so would imply legal obligations for supervision and for the safety of the pre-schoolers. County authorities in Shaanxi continue to operate under severe budgetary constraints and are often hard pressed, in the poorer reaches of this western province, to cover the basic salaries of state school teachers.

Therefore, says Gao Guangshen, after the AusAid-funded pilot finished Plan allocated CNY 2.5 million (c. USD 300,000) from its own child sponsorship schemes over the period 2003-2005 to continue and extend the pre-school programme—still within the same five counties of Shaanxi, but working more closely with the education authorities, who were beginning to establish state funded (共办) kindergarten classes in village primary schools.

School mapping

According to Gao, national family planning policies and out-migration from rural areas have combined to cause a decline in the number of primary school entrants. This means that there is now some spare infrastructure capacity in small village primary schools that teach grades 1 to 4, after which children enter “integrated primary schools” in larger villages or townships.

National education authorities, Gao explains, have been urging localities to conduct “school mapping” exercises to assess present and likely future needs. This, he says, has created an excellent opportunity for Plan to work closely with county education bureaus, using the NGO’s resources not for construction—since buildings are already available—but for play equipment, kindergarten teacher training and local government capacity building. One of Plan’s aims, says Gao, has been to help county authorities develop standards for conversion of old schools into kindergartens and for managing the new facilities.

Last year, AusAid agreed additional funding of USD 150,000 to support the scaling-up of Plan’s pre-school work, and local government partners are also investing their own resources in the cooperation programme. Plan staff and consultants have been working with experts from Beijing Normal University and elsewhere to develop appropriate training materials on early childhood care and development, covering both physical and intellectual development. In May these materials will begin to be applied and refined in a “T-o-T” (training of trainers) initiative that is expected in due course to reach all rural kindergarten teachers in ten counties, as well as school managers and local education officials.

In a later phase of the project, counties that show most promise in the earlier stages will receive additional capacity building support.

No pre-school cramming

Villagers welcome the chance to send their children to pre-school, says Gao Guangshen, both because this eases child-care in farm families, and because parents want their children to have a good start to their formal education. “First of all [parents] want the children to be well prepared for primary school, secondly they want someone to take care of the young children so that they can do their own work.”

However, Gao points out, parents—and local education officials—often tend to see pre-school education as an early start to rote learning of Chinese characters and arithmetic. This, he warns, “is not good for the children’s brains or development.” Rather than this “schoolised” (学前教育小学化) approach to early childhood development, Plan stresses the value of stimulating children’s natural thirst for learning through creative play and socialisation. This, says Gao, involves using “toys and other equipment that is safe and good for children’s intelligence” and “teaching children how to utilise their own resources.”

According to Gao, officials from Shaanxi Province Education Bureau recognise the need for a specialist approach to early childhood education and emphasised this in speeches to a workshop that marked the new phase of Plan’s work in this field. The Education Bureau of Fengxiang (凤翔) County, he adds, has issued a policy document (红头文件) warning against a “schoolised” approach in kindergartens.

For its part, Plan carries out community “information, education and communication” (IEC) campaigns about early childhood care and development. Key messages, says Gao, include “encouraging parents to spend more time with their children, helping them to play,” and also explaining that “sometimes your child is not being naughty; they just want you to pay more attention to them.”

Plan’s IEC work, Gao adds, also includes “a lot of information about how to take care of children from a health perspective,” drawing on “scientific” understanding about children’s early physical, emotional and intellectual development.

Evidence based learning

As the Plan’s pre-school cooperation unfolds, Gao believes it will be essential to invest in peer review of materials and methodologies and also in impact monitoring. “Research is very important to show how this impacts on children’s lives,” he says, “so we will help the local government to do monitoring and evaluation of early childhood care and development work” as a basis for future cooperation and capacity building. “We want to help local government find out how to use their own funds in more effective ways . . . but we always want to use evidence to persuade government,” Gao concludes.

Plan has also worked to support primary schooling in Shaanxi through a USD 1.77 million school improvement project, supported by Plan’s Netherlands affiliate. This has included primary teacher training but also the setting up of school development committees, including parent and teacher representatives, which draw up school development plans.

Plan, formerly known as Plan International, has worked in China since 1996, and employs around 140 Chinese professional staff.

Report by Nick Young, April 15, 2007