China: A Systematic Approach to Rural School Improvement: Teachers, Technologies and Leadership

Abstract

The People’s Republic of China, with a population of over 1.3 billion covering approximately 9.6 million square kilometres, is the world’s most populous country. Since the implementation of economic reform in the late 1970s, China has become one of the world’s fastest-growing economies with the gross domestic production (GDP) growth rate averaging between 7 and 8% a year in recent decades and has become the world’s second largest economy by nominal total GDP (World Bank, The World Bank Annual Report 2015, The World Bank, 2015).

Introduction

The People’s Republic of China, with a population of over 1.3 billion covering approximately 9.6 million square kilometres, is the world’s most populous country. Since the implementation of economic reform in the late 1970s, China has become one of the world’s fastest-growing economies with the gross domestic production (GDP) growth rate averaging between 7 and 8% a year in recent decades and has become the world’s second largest economy by nominal total GDP (World Bank, 2015).

With almost 260 million students and over 15 million full-time teachers in about 514,000 schools, China’s state-run education system is not only the biggest in the world, but also one of the most diverse (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2014). Of the 15 million teachers, 5.5 million teach in the primary sector and 3.5 million in the junior secondary sector, accounting for over 60% of the teaching force. In recent years, the Ministry of Education (MOE) has devolved the governing and delivery of basic education to 2,852 county-level educational divisions within China.

The National Medium and Long-Term Educational Reform and Development Programme (2010–2020) (MOE, 2010) set four priority areas for education: (i) rural, remote, poor and minority areas; (ii) primary education in rural areas, vocational education and preschool education; (iii) subsidies for students from poor families; and (4) building a high-quality team of teachers. It also stipulated that spending on education as percentage of GDP should continue to grow in accordance with the country’s economic development and revenue growth towards the goal of spending over 4% of GDP on education by 2014.

The last two decades also saw major curriculum reform initiated in 2001. Six key objectives were specified in the Basic Education Curriculum Reform Outline:

• Change from a narrow perspective of knowledge transmission through classroom instruction to a broad perspective of learning how to learn and developing positive attitudes.

• Change from a subject-centred curriculum structure to a balanced, integrated and selective curriculum structure to meet the diverse needs of schools and students.

• Change from partly out-of-date and extremely abstruse curriculum content to essential knowledge and skills in relation to students’ lifelong learning.

• Change from a passive-learning and rote-learning style to an active, problem-solving learning style to improve students’ overall abilities to process information, acquire knowledge, solve problems and learn cooperatively.

• Change the function of curriculum evaluation from narrowly summative assessment (e.g. examinations for the certificate of levels of achievement and for selection) to more formative purposes such as the promotion of student growth, teacher development and instructional improvement as additional functions.

• Change from centralised curriculum control to a joint effort between the central government, local authorities and schools to make the curriculum more relevant to local situations.

The new reform also established a comprehensive evaluation system that introduced formative forms of assessment to inform the teaching and learning process alongside summative forms that put an emphasis of student academic grades. The new system was designed to diversify the criteria for student outcomes, thus changing the traditional examination-oriented mode of study to reduce the influence of standardised testing on teaching and learning approaches.

Recent education reforms have placed a greater emphasis on universalising nine-years of compulsory education and improving the quality of the education provision, especially in rural areas. National data indicated that the reforms were meeting with success with the enrolment ratio of school-age children in 2014 reaching more than99% (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2015). Following its efforts to universalise compulsory education nationwide, the MOE put more emphasis on a balanced development approach in order to narrow the rural–urban gap and regional differences.

Following this introduction, the chapter is divided into four sections. Section 1 presents the background and design of the China-UK Southwest Basic Education Project. In Sect. 2 a discussion of the implementation of the project is presented followed by a discussion of its impact and outcomes in Sect. 3. Section 4 discusses the sustainability of the project.

1 School Improvement in China-UK Southwest Basic Education Project

The School Improvement in China-UK Southwest Basic Education Project (SBEP) was a bi-lateral development project between the Chinese Government and the Government of the United Kingdom (UK). The main purpose of the project was to support the Government of China to achieve its goals in basic education, by increasing capacity to implement effective programmes that increased equitable access, completion and achievement for the disadvantaged boys and girls. The project covered 27 rural and remote counties which are considered some of the poorest in China. The 27 counties are spread over the four provinces (or autonomous region) of Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan and Guangxi. The total budget for the project was £23.6 million and each province provided 10% of the amount as local funding of the project. The project was officially launched in November 2006 and was completed by the end of March 2011.

The project was designed in response to the need to change the underlying pedagogic practices that lead to the transmission of knowledge and rote learning. Its focus was on improving the pedagogical practices of teacher and drew on the international research suggesting that the quality of teaching was the most important factor in student achievement (Dembele & Lefoka, 2007). Its general approach was to bring together decentralised MOE functions at the county level, teacher institutes, teacher resource centres and schools to ensure coherence, consistency and quality of training so that all children have access to teachers with minimal competences. Therefore, a field-based model of school-based training and school clusters was proposed as a way of closing the gap between theory and practice and raising the quality of teaching and learning in basic education (Mattson, 2006).

As discussed previously, curriculum and assessment reforms were introduced to transform teaching practices from the traditional examination-oriented approaches of rote memorisation, lecture and drill to more student-centred approaches where students were given the opportunity to develop their creativity, learn by doing, collaborate with others, and to express their ideas (Dello-Iacovo, 2009). The new curriculum and assessment reforms also gave an added impetus to achieve ‘teacher quality for all’, especially in rural or remote areas of the country as there was a broad consensus, drawing on international research that the teacher was the single most important school variable in influencing student achievement (OECD, 2016). It was also seen as an important element in promoting social justice in terms of educational quality in rural and remote areas of China, where teachers tended to be less qualified than their urban peers and less well-resourced.

1.1 Whole School Development

Based on an analysis of the needs for promoting education quality in rural schools of the project counties, a comprehensive school improvement model known as Whole School Development (WSD) was applied in SBEP. The whole school approach, originally piloted in Ghana, treated the school as the unit of change to harness improvements in, for example, management strategies, school development plans, monitoring, in-service education and training and teacher appraisal to orchestrate a change in the culture and organisation of the school to improve pedagogical practices and the learning outcomes of students (Ghartey, 2011). It viewed teachers as active learners who had a key role to play in their professional development and acknowledged the importance of teacher beliefs and motivations, their economic and social situation, and the impact of the educational and administrative context in which they worked (Hargreaves, 2008).

This was in contrast to a more traditional approach that assumed that clearly identifiable teaching skills were able to produce specific student learning outcomes while ignoring the complexity of the school and classroom environment and wider contextual setting. Central to the WSD model was the building of capacity of head teachers and teachers at the school and cluster level as the main route to continuous and lasting changes to bring about improvement in education quality (Fullan, 2001). It also recognised the need for a highly interactive and collaborative environment as studies of teacher professional communities suggested the ways in which teachers worked together impacted on their work in terms of what and how they taught in classrooms, how they understood their work with learners and what they expected of each other and learners (McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001) (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

School improvement framework of SBEP

In the context of the SBEP, project school improvement interventions focused on five areas: (1) in line with national new curriculum reforms, improve teaching and learning through practising learner-centred teaching approaches in the classroom; (2) build up the county teacher support system to promote school-based teaching research and provide support to teachers’ continuing professional development (CPD); (3) enhance school leadership through head teacher training and implementing School Development Planning (SDP); (4) introduce an inspection system to provide external support for school improvement; and, (5) actively engage parents and community in school development to achieve a mutual development of both the school and community.

1.2 The Process of School Improvement Under SBEP

The curriculum reform had called for transformative change in all areas of the Chinese education system, including educational philosophy, curricula structure and administration, curricula standards and content, pedagogy, the development and use of curriculum resources, curricula assessment and evaluation, and teacher education and development (MOE, 2010). Of all these elements, the quality of classroom teaching was recognised as the key determinant in raising student achievement given the fact that in the absence of textbooks and other learning resources the teacher was often the primary source for learning academic content and therefore key to improving the quality of education in remote rural areas of China. These transformative changes required teachers to re-conceptualise their understanding of teaching and learning and their own identities as learners formed in an examination-orientated education system. Teachers were required to become critically reflective educators with the capacity to provide relevant support to students with different learning needs. Many teachers were challenged by the new curriculum reforms, particularly those working in rural settings, because of the constraints of the existing evaluation system and the lack of professional development opportunities and resources.

A qualitative baseline study for SBEP conducted in 2007 revealed that the status quo of classroom teaching and learning practices in project primary and junior middle schools was being perpetuated (Box 1). It also helped identify the issues that needed to be addressed through the project intervention.

Box 1 SBEP Baseline Study

• Lecturing was the dominant form of teaching with little engagement of students. It was found in the survey that teachers lectured for over 85% time of the class time. The students were treated as passive listeners and asked to do repeated exercises.

• There was a lack of variety in the teaching approaches used in the classroom.

• Lesson content was mainly based on the textbook with little or no relevance to the local context and real life.

• There was no differentiation of lesson delivery. In most cases, teaching was planned with no consideration of differences in student age, gender and learning needs.

  Source SBEP National Project Management Office (2007), China-UK Southwest Basic Education Project: Baseline Qualitative Survey Report, SBEP NPMO, Beijing.

1.3 Participatory Teaching

The participatory approach to teaching and learning was adopted by the SBEP schools as a way of improving teaching and learning, whereby traditional rote-learning methods would be transformed into participatory and active learning approaches. It aimed to broaden the repertoire of whole class teaching by introducing teachers to paired and group work and to the use of dialogue and discussion, though, for example, open-ended questions and probing and following up student answers, alongside the more traditional drilling, closed questioning and telling, thereby raising student cognitive engagement and understanding.

It called on teachers to acknowledge the needs and interests of their students, to permit the students to learn at his/her own pace, to encourage learning through doing and collaboration so as to engage students into meaningful learning, and to provide remedial and enrichment instruction where needed. As such, it represented a major shift in working practices for teachers, many of whom had been using a teacher-fronted ‘chalk and talk’ method, promoting the transmission of knowledge and rote learning. It was recognised that such a paradigm shift would only come about after repeated practice and critical reflection. Therefore, the project developed a series of teacher training modules to support the teachers.

The process of developing the training materials also served as a capacity building exercise for teacher trainers at provincial and county level. In most cases, the SBEP trainers were staff recruited from County Education Bureaus (CEB), teacher training institutes and project schools and they were involved from the beginning in the planning and writing of the modules based on surveys of teachers’ training needs. In the process of the module development, the teacher trainers were given the opportunity to reflect on their practice and share their knowledge and expertise so as to arrive at a shared understanding of an active learning.

1.4 Training of Trainers

The SBEP covered all primary and junior middle school teachers in the 27 project counties, totalling 70,000 teachers in total. In order to ensure the widest reach possible, the training was initially cascaded down to schools through the training of trainers as shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2

The teacher training model of southwest basic education project (SBEP)

Usually, there would be 20–30 trainers in each county made up of, as discussed earlier, local education bureau (EBU) officers, teacher trainers and expert teachers divided into teams of 6. Each member of the team was tasked with specific training responsibilities and a professional development portfolio was developed to promote critical reflection and review based on observation and feedback following each of the training sessions to help build capacity and a shared understanding of the programme.

2 Implementation of SBEP

Project counties were required to submit annual training plans that included budgets, personnel and resource allocation, timing and location of training venues and monitoring and evaluation activities. The EBU schools and teachers were actively involved into the planning stages which ensured a good level of coordination between different stakeholders and that the training was embedded into the daily life of the schools and classrooms.

SBEP teacher training were required to start with the most disadvantaged villages and townships in project counties with ethnic minority teachers, women teachers and teachers from remote teaching points being the priority group, followed by teachers in the townships. By relating the training content closely to the reality of the local classroom, the trainers supported the teachers to experience, internalise, practice and reflect on the participatory approach during the course of the training. During this process, the teachers’ practical knowledge and experience was drawn upon and highly valued and respected. Teachers were also encouraged to conduct their action research to find local solutions to challenges they faced in their own classroom.

2.1 School-Based Professional Development

Following the training workshops, the teachers were followed up in the schools. This was in recognition of the lack of impact of in-service education and training (INSET) made up of short-term training delivered through cascading or multiplier workshops with little or no follow-up in the classroom on classroom practice (Save the Children, 2012). Without sustained practice, reflection and re-action, the research suggested workshop training is not enough to bring about changes in teachers’ ideas, attitudes and behaviours, particularly for those who had practiced transmission-based teaching for decades. Therefore, it was crucial to provide follow-up support to teachers so they could try and practise new skills and strategies in the context of their classrooms following the intensive workshop training.

In the case of SBEP, county trainers and a group of key teachers were organised to provide support to classroom teachers by conducting coaching, observation and feedback to teachers in the schools. It was required by the project that every school teacher was observed and given feedback at least three times within a semester. The focus of the follow-up observation and feedback was the application of participatory approaches in the classroom. The classroom observation and feedback were recorded using a standardised protocol. These documents were kept by the teachers and used by the schools to inform their whole school development plan.

The project encouraged rural schools to set up school-based teaching research groups organised in units by subject or teaching grade to engage in, for example, lesson demonstration, collective lesson planning and resource. These school-based professional learning activities were designed to enable school teachers to work together and learn from each other so as to build up a community of professional practice in the school. The CPD activities were also incorporated into the school development plans and the head teacher was given training and expected to lead the school-based professional learning.

2.2 County Support System for Teacher Professional Development

By targeting the poorest counties in China with the majority of schools located in remote rural areas, teachers working in those schools faced challenges not only from poor infrastructure and a lack of teaching and learning resources, but also from few opportunities to participate in professional development activities. Such limitations were captured in the training needs analysis that was conducted prior to the development and roll out of SBEP.

• Many teachers had never received any INSET after decades of teaching.

• Most INSET, where it was provided, was ad hoc and irrelevant to local needs. The provision of training did not help teachers meet the challenges in their practice such as teaching large classes, multi-grade teaching and teaching in a bilingual context.

• The workshop training was mainly lecture-based and teachers had little chance to interact with the trainers to ask questions and to share their experiences.

• There was no feedback or follow-up support after training. It was hard for teachers to apply what they learned into practice without follow up support. Teachers chose to give up trying out the new approach and went back to old ways once they encountered any challenges.

• Training venues were often far away from the teachers’ workplace. It was therefore time-consuming and costly trip for them to travel to get the training venue. In addition, because of the shortage of teachers in rural schools, teachers were not allowed out of school to attend the training in order to keep the school open.

In order to provide a relevant and sustained support mechanism for teachers working in remote rural schools, SBEP introduced a county-level support system which was based on the existing infrastructure to support teacher CPD activities. A concept map was developed showing institutions involved in the country-level support mechanism and how they were to be linked to each other (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3

County support system for teacher support system

A planning framework was also developed and shared with stakeholders at the county and school level setting out roles, responsibilities, frequency of training activities, time lines and expected outcomes for the teacher support system. It was divided into six steps and was to be rolled out to schools taking into consideration the contextual realities of their locations:

Step 1: Build up a shared understanding of rural teacher support system: its aims and objectives, working mechanism and major activities

The key goals of the county-level support system were to:

• Support the professional development of teachers in remote and rural areas.

• Improve pedagogical skills.

• Expand teacher professional knowledge.

• Improve students learning and enjoyment in the classroom.

• Contribute to the development of INSET in rural areas.

• Improve collaborative ways of working.

• Improve links with the parents and the wider community.

Step 2: Get county CEB’s approval through policy-making and support for administrative management of the teacher support system

Within SBEP, the commitment and leadership of the CEB in the TSS included: (1) issuing formal policy documents stating the actions to be taken actions to merge teacher training schools and to create partnerships with schools; (2) to set up and institutionalise the township teacher learning resource centres (TLRC).

Step 3: Selecting personnel and capacity building of county trainers

To ensure the goals of the support system were met, all of the county trainers needed to be carefully selected and trained. They were to be trained in how to teach and work with adults. SBEP personnel were organised into the following teams:

• Management and Technical Assistance Team: CEB director, staff from divisions in CEB, distance education office, teacher training school and expert teachers from schools in the county.

• Management of TLRC at township level: Head teachers from centre and village schools, directors of teaching affairs in schools, expert teachers.

Step 4: Embedding good practices throughout the system

A series of professional practices were embedded throughout the system. They included in-service training workshops at TLRCs, classroom observation and feedback, teacher mentoring, classroom action research and joint lesson planning. All of these activities focused on the formative development of teachers and provided follow-up support in the classroom. A formal record of these activities was kept at the school by the head teacher and used to inform whole school planning and inform the further development needs of the teachers.

Step 5: Developing and managing resources for teaching and learning at the TLRC

Resources were given to township TLRCs so as to facilitate teacher training and classroom teaching. They included training modules and DVDs modelling classroom practices. Copies of lesson plans, hand-made teaching aids and books were also collected and kept in township TLRCs as a support resource for teachers.

Step 6: Monitoring and evaluation of the TSS

A series of guidelines and handbooks were developed and shared with the various actors in the system. These materials brought coherence to the CPD activities and provided for standardisation and quality assurance of the training across the provinces and counties. In addition, seminars on issues arising from implementation of the TSS were periodically organised by the project’s management office at national, provincial and county level. These meetings offered opportunities for the sharing of good practices, ensuring consistency and raising the quality of project provision across regions.

By the end of SBEP in 2011, 249 township TLRCs had been established in the poorest townships of the 27 project counties to provide teachers with more accessible CPD opportunities and better support resources. It was also reported through the monitoring and evaluation activities that the capacity of individuals and institutes to provide support to teachers was being strengthened and that they were more confident in conducting needs analysis to inform the design of the CPD programmes and to assess their impact.

2.3 Promoting School Leadership and Management

Research suggests effective school leadership is a key prerequisite of school improvement (Harris & Chapman, 2004). Once schools have taken the initial steps on the way to school improvement, it is recognised that the school leadership needs to become more distributed in order for improvement to be sustained and capacity built across the school.

The project baseline report had found that the management of education at school level was generally weak. Most head teachers were not capable of initiating and managing change to meet the needs of the new curriculum reform. The challenges in terms of school leadership and management in SBEP context included:

• Principals’ leadership and management skills were not satisfactory generally. Most rural school principals had no pre-service training, and they conducted school management only by virtue of their personal experience.

• The project schools had a year plan which was mostly a copy of the work plan of county education bureau with little focus on school-based issues. These plans were made in a top-down approach without involvement of school staff and the wider community, and in most cases the plans paid little attention to disadvantaged groups.

Two interventions were therefore adopted in the SBEP project schools to promote school leadership and build school capacity for sustainable development: leadership and management training for head teachers and the introduction of whole school planning discussed in the next section.

As part of the training for head teachers under SBEP, two training manuals were produced: “Principal Leadership Development Module I” and “Principal Leadership Development Module II”. By the end 2010, the training was delivered to more than 90% of the head teachers in project counties (see Table 1). In addition to the head teacher, a woman teacher from each of the schools who showed leadership was invited to the training to promote greater gender equality.

Table 1 Number of teachers and principals completing head teacher capacity building training

The head teacher training workshop were delivered using a participatory approach and the programme content was closely related to the issues and challenges faced by rural school. The two training modules were delivered over a 9 to 12-month period.

2.4 School Development Planning

School development planning (SDP) was introduced into China in the late 1990s through a series through the international education aid projects. Based on the needs identified by the SBEP baseline survey, a series of materials was developed with a focus on practising SDP in remote rural schools in south west China. These included a training module on introducing the school and the wider community to SDP and mobilising women in community participation in SDP. The training workshops were school-based and delivered to head teachers, teachers and community leaders to ensure their participation in the SDP. Implementation of the SDP at school level was divided into three stages: planning, implementation and review stage. Figure 4 below shows the process and steps followed by project schools as they formulated and implemented their SDP.

Fig. 4

(Source China-UK Southwest Basic Education Project Management Office. A Guide to School Development Planning. Beijing: Education Science Publishing House, 2009. pp. 20)

School development planning process and steps

The first step to implementing the SDP was to prepare all teachers and staff in the school through school-based training on the concept, values and skills of SDP. A school development management committee (SDMC) was required to be set up which was to be composed of ten persons with at least two female representatives and one of the two being a local women resident. In most cases, the school head teacher took the role of the chair of the committee. The committee members were composed of local community cadres, teacher representatives and villager representatives. The committee was responsible for the decision-making and implementation of the school development plan, and for reviewing, supporting and evaluating the implementation.

The project identified six focus areas for rural school development in the context of SBEP which served as a framework for schools to critically scrutinise the provision. These focus areas included: (1) student enrolment and consolidation; (2) learning achievement and students well-being; (3) teaching and learning; (4) physical condition and school environment; (5) pastoral care for student with a focus on marginalised groups; and, (6) school management and leadership.

Issues were identified for further study in each of the areas with the aim of finding relevant solutions. In addition, schools invited comments and suggestions from the local community by conducting SDP community meetings and field visits to parents and local residents. Opinions and suggestions were collected from different stakeholders including teachers, students, village committee, villagers, women, parents, and local religious representatives.

A written school development plan was drafted based on the data analysis, which covered concerns from the local community and challenges and opportunities for school improvement. A series of actions in the six focus areas were identified and listed on the plan with a clear statement of outcomes and timetable for their implementation. Stakeholders, including teachers, students and community members, were not only involved in the formulation of the SDP, but also taking responsibility for implementation of the plan.

2.5 Involvement of Community and Parents in School Improvement

As discussed in the introduction, the administrative system of compulsory education in China has been laid at the county level since 2001, which meant that the county system of government was responsible for local education development planning, funding, the recruitment of teachers and the appointment of principles. The positive impact of this policy was that it ensured education funds were dispersed down to the township and village administrative levels. However, the SBEP baseline survey found that the provision of county level funding reduced the involvement of the local community and parents in the running of the school.

In order to improve the involvement of the local community and parents in the running of the school, SBEP launched two initiatives: (1) direct involvement of parents and community members in SDMC to draw up the WDP; and, (2) production of a training manual and provision of training workshops to improve women’s awareness, capacity and participation in the SDC. In implementing the policy under SBEP, the following practices were found to be effective in increasing local community and parental involvement in the running of the school:

• Setting up a SDMC by inviting the community and women representatives to act as core members to act as a mechanism for improving cooperation between the school and local community.

• Teachers conducting home visits to help parents or guardians analyse the performance and challenges that their children were facing and to provide appropriate support where appropriate.

• School open days for parents and community members to observe lessons, learn about teaching, learning and assessment approaches and to discuss educational issues arising from the visit with principal and teachers.

• Organising parents’ meeting during quieter periods in the farming season and involving parents in the management of the meetings.

• Strengthening contact and communication with parents working away from the local community as migrant workers through writing letter, telephone calls, and use of the internet to build up closer relationships with their children in order to support learning and social and emotional development.

• Cultural activities organised jointly by the school and local community.

• Opportunities for community members to participate in school management team meetings.

2.6 School Inspection

In China, the inspection offices at county level were usually located at the county education bureau. Because of limited budgets, a lack of manpower and weak professionalism, the focus of the inspection was often on the implementation of national and local policies, the facilities and equipment status in schools, enrolment rates and student test scores. It was rarely about quality assurance and enhancement of pedagogical processes. For example, a SBEP monitoring report stated ‘The inspection didn’t pay enough attention to aspects such as teachers, student learning, or the relationship between the school and the community. In most cases, the most disadvantaged schools like small village schools and teaching points in very remote areas were likely ignored. Additionally, there was a weak link between resource allocation or support provision to schools within the inspection result’ (SBEP NPMO, 2007).

In response to this finding and lessons learnt from an earlier China-UK Gansu Basic Education Project, SBEP introduced and implemented a developmental inspection model to project counties. Compared to the traditional model of inspection, the developmental model of quality assurance and enhancement was to include the following aspects:

• Self-evaluation and review of school development plan prior to inspection;

• School development plan to act as a starting point for the inspection;

• Interviews with a range of stakeholders including parents, community leaders and officers from the education bureau;

• Observation of teaching and learning making up 50% of the inspection time;

• Revision of the school development plan considering the findings and recommendations of the inspection.

The project school inspection teams were composed of 2–4 persons, including a team leader and normally included county inspectors, head teachers, expert teachers and county teacher trainers. Inspection training modules were developed to equip inspectors with the knowledge and skills necessary for conducting the developmental model of inspection. They described the methods and procedures for carrying out the inspection of schools and the protocols, procedures and practical organisation of the visit.

Monitoring the quality of pedagogical processes in the school was at the core of the inspection process. Talking to teachers, parents and students about the work seen was also seen as a way of reinforcing this process by ensuring evidence was corroborated through a process of triangulation. During the inspection, which normally lasted a couple of days, inspectors were expected to follow an inspection framework and maintain a detailed record of evidence in an official notebook so as to substantiate their collective judgements.

The school visit was divided into three stages as illustrated in Fig. 5. The inspection guidelines set out the main tasks and activities to be carried out before, during and after the inspection of the school as follows:

Fig. 5

(Source The Project Office of China-UK Southwest Basic Education Project. Guidance Book for School Inspection. Chinese Financial & Economic Publishing House. 2009. 7–8)

Flow chart of SBEP school inspection

• Before the field visit to schools, inspectors were to review the school development plan, school self-evaluation report and other supporting materials in order to identify the focus areas for the inspection visit.

• During the school visit, inspectors were to collect evidence from classroom observations, review of documents, interviews with focus groups and individuals, including teachers, students, parents, school leaders and community members.

• More than 50% of the school visit was to be spent on classroom observation covering all teachers and subjects.

• Inspection teams were to make evidence-based judgments focusing on three key issues (students development, quality of school provision, school leadership and management) using key indicators and standard descriptors.

• At the end of the visit, the team should provide formal oral feedback on the inspection findings with the school’s head teacher, teachers and community leaders.

• After the school visit, inspectors were to draft the inspection report with specific comments and recommendations for school to improve their development plan. A return visit would be conduct if there was a stated need.

As set out in the guidelines, the focus of the school inspection was divided into three aspects: students’ development, quality of school provision, school leadership and management as shown in Fig. 6. The inspectors were required to collect relevant data and evidences according to the specific indicators developed in each focus area and award a grade judgment for each area. There were four levels of grade: A, B, C and D. In addition to grade evaluation, the most important aspect of the inspection was for the inspector team to identify the strengths of the school and provide constructive feedback to for future improvements.

Fig. 6

(Source The Project Office of China-UK Southwest Basic Education Project. Guidance for School Inspection. Chinese Financial & Economic Publishing House. 2009. 16)

Focus areas of SBEP school inspection

By the end of the programme in 2011, in the 27 project counties of Yunnan, Guangxi, Sichuan and Guizhou, 431 schools had been inspected which exceeded the planned numbers. Over 90% of the inspected schools reported that new inspection model had helped to improve the leadership and management at the school.

3 Impacts and Outcomes of SBEP

By the end of 2010, SBEP had trained 61,971 teachers, involving over 90% of those based in rural settings. Table 2 shows the number and proportion of teachers trained in each of the modules.

Table 2 Basic info of teacher training in China-UK SBEPFootnote

In 2011, four provinces were still in the process of delivering the training and are not presented in the table. In addition, the table does not include the number of trainers trained at the county and township levels.

Similarly, Table 3 shows the number of schools that had produced and implemented an SDP by December 2010.

Table 3 The implementation of SDP in SBEP

Findings from the evaluation found that SBEP has had a significant effect on pedagogical practices. For example, a mid-term review found that the baseline figure of 90% of the class time being by dominating teacher lecturing was greatly to two-thirds of the time and that by the end of the project in 2011 it had declined to 64.4% and 65.0% of the lesson time at primary and junior middle level respectively. Students were also spending more of their time working in pairs or groups compared to the baseline. At the start of the project, no paired or group-based activities were observed as part of the baseline. By the end of the project in 2011, in a survey of teaching and learning practices it was also reported that 45% of students had participated in a paired-or group-based activities during the two weeks prior to the survey (SBEP NPMO 2011). Student achievement in the project schools had also improved. Compared to the baseline measure and a comparison group of non-project counties, the end-line evaluation found that scores in mathematics had significantly improved in the intervention counties. However, the mean effect sizes for learning outcomes in Chinese were not as significant (SBEP NPMO, 2010).

The baseline evaluation found SBEP had improved the teacher support systems in the counties by enhancing the capacity of the local teacher training institutes and their partnerships with schools serving remote rural areas. The system of school clusters at the township and village levels had also been enhanced and schools were reporting their regular participation in school- and cluster-based activities including study groups, peer observation and the support of teacher educators visiting the schools. The TLRCs were also adding to professional development opportunities for the teachers working in rural schools through the provision of DVD demonstration lessons, teaching and learning resources, lesson plans and teacher guides.

In addition, the baseline evaluation reported that the capacity of the school leadership and management teams had been strengthened through the training and implementation of SDPs. The end of project evaluation found that decision-making had become more distributed in the project schools involving teachers, parents and students and that all of the project schools had an SDP in place. Table 4 shows the identified targets for school improvement at different stages of SBEP.

Table 4 Targets for improvement covered in primary school SDPs

The bottom-up planning process had made it possible for community representatives, parents, teachers and students to participate in the planning and decision-making processes, which ensured the acceptance and the successful implementation of the SDPs. For example, the quantitative survey found that in Zhenxiong, Yunnan, about 10–20% of community members regularly participated in SDCM and as a result they were able to express their views and recommendations to the school leadership. Female parent visits to the schools had also increased significantly: the quantitative survey showed that in primary and junior high schools there are respectively 60% and 68.5% of women visiting the school on their own initiative (SBEP NPMO, 2011). It was also found that parent concerns had been shifted from the cost of schooling to the quality of teaching and learning. For example, the end of project review found that in junior high schools, 74.5% of parents in SBEP schools, compared to 65% in non-SBEP schools, visited to discuss the academic progress of their children. Such figures suggested that parents in SBEP schools were more involved in their children’s education.

According to the project log frame, by the end of SBEP, 30% of SBEP schools (390 schools in total) needed to be inspected under the new development model. In the 27 counties of Yunnan, Guangxi, Sichuan and Guizhou, 431 school were inspected, accounting for 111% of schools in the original plan (SBEP NPMO 2011). Despite being implemented over a two-year period, the inspection model made a positive impact on building capacity at the school level (principals, teachers and SDMC) and educational administrative level (County Education Bureau officers and Inspection Officers). It also provided new insights into how to promote school development through school inspection.

4 Conclusions

While the evaluation of SBEP suggests it was a success in addressing the needs of schools and teachers in remote rural areas of southwest China, it is also recognised that there are certain prerequisites for its scale up: genuine ownership and leadership at all levels and the sustainability of the reform. It was recognised in the roll out of the project that the human process of developing ownership, strengthening new behaviours, and changing systems needed to done at county-by-county, township-by-township, and school-by-school levels. Sustainable education outcomes will not be achieved merely by reproducing successful, but individual, projects like SBEP, but by aligning them with the broader context of educational reform. Sustainable scale requires not only a financial commitment by the CEB but also ownership and direction by range all stakeholders, including education administrators, principals, teachers, community leaders and parents.

The longer-term sustainability of projects like SBEP will require policy alignment and capacity development of the institutions and organisations at county level responsible for the strategic management of the education sector and of the local institutions and personnel charged with implementing the reforms introduced by project. This presents a great challenge for the local education bureau, teacher training institutions, inspectors, schools and individuals as capacity development is a long-term process.

The Chinese government is continuing with its investment in distance education and ICT provision for teachers based in rural schools in western and rural China to distribute opportunities for learning more widely and equitably across the teaching force (OECD, 2016). It is also improving the quality and variety of the resources and support available to teachers, opening up new avenues to professional development. By taking a school-based approach supported by ICT, it is providing more inclusive access while at the same time extending learning opportunities beyond the boundaries of the school. It is also shifting the emphasis from a supply-driven provision to a demand-initiated one, giving teachers and head teachers more ownership and choice in their professional development.

TLRCs based at central schools in townships are increasingly being used as part of the school-based training system for housing ICT equipment and resources and for acting as a venue for teacher professional development activities. In addition to internet access, learning resources, including audio and video CDs, books and guides for teachers and head teacher are being made available in the TLRCs to support professional development activities. They are allowing teachers to work together at the school and cluster level either online or in meetings and workshops on curriculum innovations and teaching methods. This includes observing and discussing lessons either on DVD or in real-time via satellite television, creating educational resources, preparing lesson plans with colleagues and interacting with teacher educators.

By taking a system-wide approach to rural teachers’ school-based professional development, with strong support from the leadership at provincial and local levels of government and supported by distance education and ICT and the generation of activities at the TLRC and local cluster level, teachers are increasingly being mobilised to bring about changes in their pedagogical knowledge, skills and attitudes commitment.