The Blue Book of Education (Annual Report on China’s Education (2018)) was officially released by the 21st Century Education Research Institute and Social Sciences Academic Press (China) on April 25 in Beijing. Experts, scholars and front-line educators attending the conference conducted lectures and reports and exchanged their views on education. The report focuses on topics including the lightening of the workload for primary and middle school students, regulation and governance of tutorial classes outside of school, reform of the examination and enrolment system, innovation and reforms in the evaluation of regional education administration, the development of higher vocational education and other important issues.
The Blue Book points out that in order to realize the goal of educational modernization, we should actively improve the government’s functions, form a modern educational governance structure in which different principals can participate, construct, share and promote the establishment of a better educational system so as to relieve the contradiction between unbalanced and inadequate educational resources and the people’s ever-growing need for a better education.
The Blue Book includes a number of surveys in the field of education, including on the reform of the Shanghai college entrance examination according to the “teaching – testing – recruiting” linkage; the need to encourage the diversity of education and stabilize the scale of vocational education; rural students’ education under the differentiation of urban and rural education, the impact of the school’s “soft environment” and family background differentiation and the profound changes in the management system with the rapid increase in the number of international students after the “Belt and Road” initiative.
According to the Blue Book, one of the key reforms for achieving educational modernization is the reform of the educational evaluation system, with the examination system at its core. Secondly what is needed is reform of the educational system and mechanisms, with emphasis on the separation of education and assessment, and the reform of the administration.
