The Ministry of Education has released a major signal: a number of tracks including research-based study programs, AI education, and vocational education are ushering in new development space.
Over the next five years, educational resources are being redistributed, and a raft of new demands centered on schools, teachers and students will be unleashed accordingly.
On September 23, at the press conference held by the State Council Information Office, a number of educational arrangements for the 15th Five-Year Plan period were further clarified, ranging from half-day off-campus practice per week, to the continued enrollment expansion of "Double First-Class" institutions, as well as industry-education integration training bases and AI literacy training for teachers.
For the education sector, these policies represent not only changes in school teaching methods, but also mean new incremental demands may emerge in niche markets such as research and study practice, educational digitalization, vocational education, and teacher training.
At least half a day off campus per week: research and study practice evolves from "extracurricular activities" into the formal curriculum system
Basic education is the field where the new arrangements released at this press conference are relatively concentrated. One notable change is that students' learning spaces are further extending beyond school campuses.
First of all, during the 15th Five-Year Plan period, the teaching arrangement of at least half a day of off-campus practice per week for primary and secondary school students will be rolled out nationwide. All localities and schools will make reasonable arrangements according to different learning stages and incorporate them into the school's education and teaching plans. At present, Shenzhen has taken the lead in exploring the "half-day per week plan" for compulsory education schools, with nearly half of the schools across the city participating in the pilot program, covering 650,000 students.
To support this arrangement, off-campus practice resources will continue to expand. At present, the digital big map for primary and secondary school research and study practice has included 88 research camps, 662 research bases and more than 1,300 teaching practice sites for ideological and political courses. In the next step, resources such as revolutionary historical sites, museums, science and technology museums, enterprises, and factory workshops will be further opened to primary and secondary school students, and the safety guarantee and risk sharing mechanisms for transportation, catering, accommodation and other links will be improved.
Secondly, school resources will be rearranged according to changes in the school-age population. During the 15th Five-Year Plan period, more than 1,000 high-quality high schools will be built to meet the peak enrollment demand of the school-age population at the high school stage. At the same time, the county high school revitalization action will be implemented to build a number of science high schools and comprehensive high schools. For the compulsory education stage, a new round of capacity improvement projects will be launched to accelerate the full coverage of standardized school construction.
The Ministry of Education also proposed to establish a monitoring and early warning mechanism for the school-age population. New resources will be tilted towards towns with a net inflow of school-age population and regions with weak foundations, the construction of full secondary schools and 12-year consistent schools will be intensified, and the small-class teaching reform will be promoted in light of local conditions. On the basis of the original "county-level dominant" management model for basic education, a management system of "provincial-level overall planning, county-level dominance, and combined efforts of cities and counties" will be further established.
In addition to off-campus practice and school expansion, this press conference further clarified the arrangements for physical education and science and technology education.
In terms of physical education, the "2115" requirement of "2 hours of comprehensive physical activities per day, 1 physical education class per day, and 15 minutes of break between classes" has been implemented nationwide. In the next step, relevant requirements will be incorporated into class schedules and after-school services, explicitly prohibiting "duplicate class schedules (one fake for inspection, one for actual implementation)" to prevent physical education classes and breaks from being occupied.
Physical education courses will be further enriched. All localities can carry out water sports, ice and snow sports and traditional Chinese sports in light of local conditions, and implement teaching through class-shifting systems, extracurricular clubs and other forms. To address the problems of venues, teachers and safety, physical education facilities in weak rural schools will be supplemented, teachers will be supplemented through post rotation and itinerant teaching, and the sports injury insurance and due diligence exemption system will be explored.
In terms of science and technology education, the "Light-Chasing Classroom" built by the Ministry of Education in cooperation with academician teams has launched more than 100 science literacy courses, and the "Science and Technology Education" section on the National Smart Education Platform for Primary and Secondary Schools has gathered more than 3,000 high-quality resources, all of which are open to the public for free.
12 provinces including Beijing have taken the lead in exploring the coordination of science and technology education and humanities education. In the next step, efforts will be made to ensure full staffing of science and technology course teachers, make good use of vice principals for science and technology, encourage scientists and engineers to enter campuses, and incorporate scientific inquiry ability and humanistic aesthetic literacy into students' comprehensive quality evaluation.
The entry of scientists, engineers and enterprise resources into campuses has also made the connection between schools and social education resources more frequent. In particular, after the half-day off-campus practice per week becomes normalized, schools need to maintain long-term connections not only with museums, science and technology museums and research bases, but also with enterprises and institutions that can provide real production and scientific research scenarios.
At the frequency of once a week, a single visit can hardly meet the teaching needs. Different grades need to be matched with corresponding course content, off-campus projects need to align with the on-campus teaching schedule, and stable plans need to be formed for transportation organization, personnel allocation, safety management and insurance. The extended course development, practice project operation and professional personnel services will become important supports for off-campus educational resources to truly integrate into the daily teaching of schools.
"Double First-Class" continues to expand enrollment, 200 application-oriented undergraduate universities enter the "Double Excellence" construction
In terms of higher education, the information released at this press conference mainly focuses on three aspects: enrollment scale, classified development of universities and major adjustment.
First of all, "Double First-Class" universities will continue to expand enrollment. The Ministry of Education disclosed that from 2027 to 2030, the undergraduate enrollment of "Double First-Class" universities will expand by more than 76,000, and the new enrollment quotas will be tilted towards cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, biomedicine, new energy, and emerging interdisciplinary subjects.
The enrollment expansion has been continuously promoted in previous years. From 2024 to 2025, "Double First-Class" universities have cumulatively expanded enrollment by 38,000, and in 2026, the enrollment increased by 24,000, with a total enrollment expansion of 62,000 in three years. According to the 15th Five-Year Plan, by 2030, the undergraduate enrollment of "Double First-Class" universities will increase by more than 100,000.
The school-running resources required for enrollment expansion will also increase simultaneously. Funds such as central budgetary investment and ultra-long-term special treasury bonds will support "Double First-Class" universities in building new campuses and infrastructure such as dormitories, canteens, stadiums and laboratories.
Secondly, the path for the classified development of universities has been further clarified. During the 15th Five-Year Plan period, the "Double Excellence" construction plan for high-level application-oriented undergraduate universities will be implemented, supporting the construction of about 200 high-level application-oriented undergraduate universities and a number of high-quality characteristic disciplines and majors. Research-oriented, application-oriented and skill-oriented universities will be promoted for construction relying on the "Double First-Class", "Double Excellence" and "New Double High" plans respectively.
Third, the major structure will continue to be adjusted around industrial and employment demands. During the 14th Five-Year Plan period, the cumulative adjustment proportion of disciplines and majors in universities has exceeded 20%. At present, some universities have laid out new majors such as low-altitude technology and engineering, embodied intelligence, and brain science and technology. Since 2024, 8 provinces and cities have formed 247 characteristic and advantageous discipline clusters around industrial clusters, and the relevant mechanism will be further promoted in the next step.
Major adjustment will also be linked with enrollment, training and employment, and the employment situation of graduates will become an important consideration for major adjustment. With the expansion of enrollment scale and the further clarification of university classification, new resources for higher education will be more concentrated in fields urgently needed by the country and industrial demands.
The resources required for different majors are not the same. Artificial intelligence involves computing power, data and development environments, integrated circuits require design software, experimental platforms and professional equipment, while biomedicine puts forward higher requirements for laboratories and scientific research instruments. As these majors expand their enrollment and training scale, corresponding investment will also be more segmented, and the demand for universities and enterprises to jointly build laboratories, industrial colleges, courses and practice projects will increase accordingly.
This also makes the higher education market no longer only focus on the expansion of campus infrastructure, the construction of majors itself is becoming a new direction of investment.
200 training bases to be launched, vocational education continues to extend to the industrial end
In terms of vocational education, this press conference further clarified the construction scale of industry-education integration during the 15th Five-Year Plan period.
Over the next five years, about 100 municipal-level industry-education consortia, about 20 industry-level industry-education integration communities and about 200 industry-education integration training bases will be built, and future training centers will be built for 20 fields at the same time. Among them, the future training centers will be mainly deployed in fields such as smart agriculture, intelligent manufacturing and new energy vehicles, to further introduce enterprise production scenarios, new technologies and new processes into vocational education.
While the carriers of industry-education integration are expanding, talent training will be further aligned with industrial demands. During the 15th Five-Year Plan period, a high-skilled talent training program for the service industry will be implemented, covering fields such as technical supporting services, warehousing and logistics, software and data services, international trade, major project construction, urban renewal, "elderly care and childcare" and catering services.
In addition to the connection between vocational education and industries, overseas layout will continue to expand. At present, China has cooperated with 32 countries to build 38 Luban Workshops, and in the next step, 10 more will be built in Africa and SCO member states respectively.
Vocational education standards are also going global simultaneously. Wang Guangyan, Vice Minister of Education, disclosed at the State Council Information Office press conference that the upcoming World Vocational and Technical Education Development Conference this year will release the first international standard in the field of vocational education, the "Beijing Agreement". The international cooperation of vocational education will further extend from project construction to standard export.
More intensive industry-education integration projects will also bring part of the vocational education demand to the enterprise side. Training bases need to restore the real production environment as much as possible, and the equipment, software and processes in fields such as intelligent manufacturing and new energy vehicles are continuously iterating, so it is difficult for schools to complete long-term updates on their own. Equipment manufacturers, software enterprises, industrial leaders and vocational education service providers may participate more deeply in the construction of training spaces, course development, teacher training and technical services.
Among them, continuous operation may test the capabilities of participating enterprises more than one-time construction. Equipment needs maintenance and upgrading, courses need to be updated with industrial technology, and enterprise engineers may also enter schools to participate in practical training teaching. The resulting demand is not just a one-round hardware procurement, but a set of service systems centered on the long-term operation of training bases, and the cooperation between enterprises and vocational colleges will extend to more teaching and talent training links.
Full-coverage AI literacy training for teachers, education opening-up continues to expand
At this press conference, the artificial intelligence literacy training for teachers was explicitly included in the teacher team construction plan for the 15th Five-Year Plan period.
At present, the total number of teachers nationwide has exceeded 18.7 million. During the 15th Five-Year Plan period, a national action for teacher development will be launched to carry out full-coverage training of artificial intelligence literacy for all teachers. Meanwhile, the "National Training Program" currently trains nearly one million principals and teachers every year, and the "National Excellence Program" has supported 43 high-level research universities to participate in teacher training. In the next step, a national college of outstanding teachers will be built, the action to improve the quality of county high school teachers will be launched, and more high-level universities will be supported to carry out teacher education.
In addition to teacher training, the treatment guarantee is further tilted towards front-line teachers. The Ministry of Education proposed to improve the co-guarantee and linkage mechanism for the salary and treatment of primary and secondary school teachers, and the performance salary distribution will be tilted towards front-line teaching, head teachers and rural teachers.
AI training for teachers is also aligned with the deployment of intelligent education digitalization. During the 15th Five-Year Plan period, the national smart education platform will continue to be strengthened, artificial intelligence will be promoted to empower teaching, scientific research and education governance, the artificial intelligence literacy of teachers and students will be enhanced, and ethical norms and safety supervision will be strengthened.
In terms of international education, the press conference disclosed that in the 2024-2025 academic year, 380,000 international students from 191 countries and regions around the world studied and exchanged in China. During the 15th Five-Year Plan period, the "Study in China" brand will continue to be built, and high-level foreign science and engineering universities are encouraged to run cooperative schools in China; meanwhile, the study abroad service system will be improved to support Chinese students to pursue further studies overseas.
International cooperation in education will cover more fields. At present, 92 countries have included Chinese language in their national education systems. In the future, cooperation will be carried out in fields such as vocational education, basic education, engineer education, "artificial intelligence + education" and teacher development, to promote Chinese education standards, experience and solutions to participate more widely in international exchanges.
As training is integrated into specific teaching scenarios, the teacher end will also become an important entry point for the implementation of AI education products. High-frequency work such as lesson preparation, courseware generation, test paper composition, grading and learning situation analysis all correspond to more specific tool demands; the ethical norms and safety supervision emphasized at the press conference will also be implemented at the product end. Capabilities such as data security, accuracy of generated content and permission management will become the basic requirements for AI tools to enter schools.
Huai Jinpeng, Minister of Education, said at the press conference that "The 15th Five-Year Plan period is a critical stage for the construction of an education powerhouse, which shifts from overall planning and high-level advancement to full-scale efforts and in-depth promotion."
This also draws a clearer roadmap for education development in the next five years. Education will no longer only aim at improving its own scale and quality, but will be promoted in a coordinated manner under the larger framework of scientific and technological innovation, talent training and national development. By 2030, the construction of an education powerhouse will enter a new stage, with a clearer focus: to enable education to better meet the needs of human development, and to provide more solid talent and intellectual support for Chinese path to modernization.
This article is from the WeChat official account Duojing (ID: DJEDUINNO), written by Xie Qi, authorized by 36Kr for release.