Program Summary

This project intends to improve the quality of basic education in rural areas by improving school management; teaching methodology; and empowering the community to participate in education decision making and education resource allocation. Successful outcomes and practices will be presented to policy makers to be mainstreamed into the government education framework.

Why we are doing it?

The current problems in China’s rural education are:

1)   Inequity in access to education;

2)   Ineffectiveness of teaching and learning;

3)   Inefficiency of education management.

RSIP is a project to address these problems in our project areas, research the project impacts, lobbying the policy and increasing the long term education quality by empowering community participation.

Our Approach

Since 2003 our Shaanxi School Improvement Project (SSIP) has successfully shown how to improve education quality in rural areas. Our midterm review report, studies and research on the children’s emotional development and an assessment of cognitive abilities and capacity on local education policy makers show SSIP’s impacts on children, teachers, schools, communities and government.  Presentations of the experiences and practices were made to national and international education conferences. 

To mainstream SSIP’s outcomes and practices, we have extended the School Improvement Program outside of Plan China’s working areas in Shaanxi Province. We are working with the provincial governments and central government to demonstrate the project’s improvement on the quality of rural education. The ultimate goal of this project is to lobby the policy makers to adopt RSIP in the education framework and hence to ensure more children benefit.

Program Goals

1.   To improve basic education quality in rural areas.      

Improve school management by adopting School Development Planning;      

Improve teacher's teaching and children’s learning skills by adopting child-centered teaching and learning methodology;

2.   To build capacity of government education authorities and stakeholders and enable them to manage and allocate education resource based on participatory methodology.        

Introduce the outcomes and lessons learnt of project research to stakeholders to improve rural education quality;      

Advocate and lobby government at each level on civil society building;

3.   To mainstream successful outcomes and practices into the government’s education framework.      

Improve education decision making and resource allocation system by adopting participatory SDP support mechanism      

Promote the concept of civil society among stakeholders.

Program Activities

·      School Development Planning (SDP)

·      Head Teacher Training

·      School Inspector Training

·      Child-centered Teaching and Learning

·      Project Monitoring and Evaluation

·      Lobby and Advocacy

·      SDP Support Activity

·      Capacity Building

Program Partners

·      The Shaanxi Ministry of Education, which is responsible for allocating all education resource in Shaanxi province, will be the main actor of RSIP. The Minsitry will be responsible for designing overall project policies, supervising county education bureaus by reviewing their proposals and managing their project activities, organising monitoring and evaluation activities, and mainstreaming the RSIP’s experiences in other areas of Shaanxi Province as well as China.

·      The Shaanxi Institute of Education, which is the major official institution responsible for training teachers and head teachers of primary and middle schools in Shaanxi Province.

·      Plan China will cooperate with Northwest University, which has strong influence on the Shaanxi Provincial Government.

·      At the county level, county-level education bureaus and township project offices are major project implementers. They will plan the project, coordinate training, manage Local Technical Support Teams and support School Development Program activities at the county level.

·      At the national level, Beijing Normal University, with its strong influence on Chinese Ministry of Education, will be responsible for disseminating the RSIP experiences to the Ministry Of Education policy makers.I

mpact

·      The expected project areas will be 50 townships in 10 counties in 2-3 provinces in China, the direct beneficiaries will be 1,000 head teachers, 10,000 teachers and 200,000 children and their families.

·      Children will have better access to quality education and be better educated for their future development.

·      More importantly, participatory approaches used in this project will bring people an understanding of how public affairs policy should involve local communities.