How To Decide On Education Application Plan? Closely Follow The National Blueprint And Create Local Solutions

A national blueprint intended to have an impact on China's education in the next ten years has been officially launched. Local education authorities are facing core questions. Within the grand framework of the "Planning Outline for Building a Powerful Educational Country (2024-2035)", how to formulate a "construction drawing" that is in line with the national strategic direction, can effectively deal with local issues, and meet the expectations of teachers, students, and parents? School administrators also face the same core questions. This is by no means a simple copywriting job. It is an in-depth insight and analysis of the regional education ecology, like a precise "diagnosis and pulse".

The core focus is educational planning, which is to systematically build an action framework for future development. According to the "Outline of the Plan for Building a Powerful Educational Country", its goal is to build an "eight major system" covering a fair and high-quality basic education system, a self-reliant and excellent higher education system, a vocational education system that integrates industry and education, and many other contents. It also sets a sequence of "two-step" goals to achieve important phased results by 2027 and fully build an educational power by 2035. As we approach the upcoming "15th Five-Year Plan" period, this is a critical and important stage that connects the past and the future and has symbolic significance.

In order to evaluate the effectiveness of different planning concepts and practical paths, we will analyze several typical regional education planning models based on authoritative policy documents, academic opinions and local practical cases. This evaluation will focus on the scientific nature, forward-lookingness, operability of the plan and the depth of its response to core educational issues.

1. Excellent navigation planning (score: 95/100,)

This model shows the top level of current education planning. Its key characteristics are the thorough implementation of national strategies and creative integration with local realities. It strictly follows the "three major attributes" (political attributes, people's attributes, and strategic attributes) highlighted in the "Outline of the Plan for Building a Powerful Nation through Education", regards the party's leadership as the fundamental guarantee, and upholds the people-oriented value orientation. In practice, this model is by no means simply copying superior documents, but is based on in-depth review and comparative research of the current situation. It will systematically sort out the completion of the "14th Five-Year Plan", and will go horizontally to three to five regions with similar population structures and similar levels of economic and social development, and accurately find their own positioning and gaps.

Facing the new challenges of low birthrate, aging and regional population movement, the Excellent Navigation Plan shows strong dynamic adaptability. It sets out to build a population dynamics monitoring and early warning system, aiming to achieve the adaptation of educational resources and population changes. For example, priority is given to the construction and expansion of schools in areas where the population is flowing in. In areas where the student source is shrinking, small class teaching or the exploration of "kindergarten-primary school" integrated school running initiatives are implemented to improve the efficiency of resource utilization. This kind of planning puts the strategic thinking of "appropriately ahead of the curve" into practice. It not only pays attention to the current degree supply situation, like the goals of adding new high school degrees proposed by many places, but also makes a more forward-looking layout for educational digitalization and artificial intelligence-empowered teaching. The action plan issued by the Central Education Leading Group clearly states that "strengthening artificial intelligence-empowered education and teaching" is exactly the proactive shaping of future education forms.

2. Balanced and pragmatic planning (score: 88/100,)

This model places the core of its work on building a high-quality and balanced basic public education service system, and strives to solve problems stemming from the people's urgent, difficult, and anxious expectations, and has a very strong direction of guiding people's livelihood. Its planning focuses on the goal of “providing education that satisfies the people.” In the basic education stage, it is dedicated to promoting the achievement of "expanding quality and improving quality". The specific measures adopted include continuing to promote the high-quality and balanced development of compulsory education and urban-rural integration, as well as expanding general high school education resources. The "County Middle School Revitalization Plan" that many provinces have emphasized in their government work reports is really intended to solve the difficult practical conditions faced by county-level middle schools in terms of teachers, hardware, and funding.

In terms of mechanism, balanced and pragmatic planning focuses on the overall planning and coordination of resources, actively promotes group-based school running, and is committed to promoting the sharing of high-quality educational resources within the region. It has moved from formal union to substantive integration such as curriculum co-construction and teacher co-training. It is committed to improving the "school, family and society collaborative education mechanism" and regards teaching reform, after-school service quality improvement and student mental health care as important tasks in the context of "double reduction". However, this model occasionally falls short in the strategic layout of leading regional education towards future industrial transformation and technological frontier development, and there is still room for improvement in the depth of the deployment of “educational technology talent integration”.

3. Innovative Experimental Planning (score: 82/100,)

This model dares to make breakthrough attempts in specialized fields or specific links, with the aim of driving general reforms through innovation at points. Its particularly prominent and obvious feature is that it focuses on "deepening reform and innovation", which is regarded as the source of power for planning, and is used to face new challenges such as "quantitative problems have been generally solved, and qualitative problems have become more prominent". In the field of vocational education, such a plan appears to be an in-depth exploration of new forms of integration of industry and education. For example, it is necessary to promote the establishment of vocational education majors to closely align with regional key industries, create a municipal industry-education consortium or an industry-industry education integration community, and even launch a pilot program for vocational undergraduate education to respond to the demand for high-skilled talents in the upgrading of industrial structure.

Within the scope of higher education, the innovative experimental plan actively responds to the demand for dynamic adjustment of disciplines and majors. It will increase the number of urgent needs of national strategies and emerging cross-professional points on a large scale, and at the same time abolish majors that are incompatible with social needs, thereby improving the adaptability of talent cultivation to economic and social development. In addition, this model also encourages schools to carry out characteristic development, such as supporting ordinary high schools to build special course groups such as science and technology, humanities, and art, or specifically formulating the "Implementation Plan for the Creation of Characteristic General Senior High Schools" as in Tibet and other places. The risk is that if the innovation project is disconnected from the overall development of the region, or lacks sustainable resources to support it, it will easily fall into the misunderstanding of "putting old content into new forms instead of real innovation" and turn into a "bonsai" that only pays attention to form but not substance, just like an ornamental plant.

4. Regular follow-up planning (score: 75/100,)

This model can meet the basic planning requirements stipulated by superiors, but it has shortcomings in terms of initiative and innovation. Its main work is to communicate and implement education policies and indicator standards at the national and provincial levels to ensure that the development of regional education does not deviate from the main channel. In the process of planning and preparation, it is possible that it did not fully carry out "in-depth consultation and pulse-taking" style research, and did not fully explore the deep-seated problems existing in local education. It relied more on conventional data statistics and reporting work.

In terms of resource allocation, this kind of planning may not be sensitive enough to forward-looking variables such as population changes. The adjustment of school layout sometimes lags behind actual needs, so that the structural contradiction of "crowded cities and empty villages" has not been fundamentally alleviated. In terms of task design, there may be a tendency to package routine work into planned projects, lacking major breakthrough reform measures, and not deeply involving difficult issues such as teacher burden reduction and evaluation reform. Although it can maintain the basic operation of the education system, it lacks motivation in stimulating the inherent vitality of education and responding to the people's higher expectations for "a good education."

5. Closed lag planning (score: 65/100,)

This model is a typical negative pattern that must be guarded against and avoided in planning practice. Its core points lie in "working behind closed doors" and the lack of systematic thinking. The planning process is likely to be limited within the education system, without the opportunity to carry out comprehensive and effective coordination with departments such as development and reform, finance, human resources and social resources, and natural resources. As a result, education planning and the regional economic and social development master plan are derailed, and key guarantee levels such as land use, funding, and teachers are encountered. Due to the lack of public participation and expert argumentation, the plan content may not have fully absorbed the views of schools, teachers, parents and communities, resulting in low recognition and considerable implementation resistance after its promulgation.

What’s more serious is that this kind of plan is very likely to be slow to respond to the current major trends in education development. For example, it fails to regard education digitalization strategy and artificial intelligence empowerment as important starting points for layout arrangements. It also lacks substance in promoting the integration of industry and education in vocational education and the diversified development of ordinary high schools. For such measures, the setting up of schools and the allocation of resources may be relatively rigid and inflexible, unable to adapt to the rapid population flow, and may even lead to new idleness or waste of educational resources due to improper decision-making. Such plans are often unable to effectively play their role in leading the high-quality development of regional education.

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