Abstract

Successive Chinese governments have made long-term contributions to provide equal schooling opportunities for every child. However, severe inequalities still exist between schools. Some schools have better teachers and facilities than others, which leads to intensive competition between parents when selecting schools.

Central government has recently prioritised the balanced development of compulsory education and intends to implement an inspection system to make local governments accountable for the disparity between schools.

Dr Wu’s research project is based both on qualitative survey and quantitative data analysis with around 300,000 schools to calculate the inequalities of each county and district, thus generating a specific picture of current situation of imbalanced development of compulsory education in China.