page_title: Education in Shanghai
section_title: Primary and secondary education
hierarchical_section_title: Education in Shanghai / Primary and secondary education
caption_attribution_description: English: Author: iwasgone Source: originally published at pic @ bbs.sjtu.edu.cn Date: 2006-10-12
context_page_description: Education in Shanghai includes five years of primary education, four years of junior secondary education, and three years of senior secondary education, as well as higher education, including universities and colleges.
context_section_description: The city government's education agency is the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission.
  Children with foreign passports are permitted to attend any public school in Shanghai. Prior to 2007 they were permitted to attend 150 select public schools. In 2006 about 2,000 non-Chinese nationals under 18 years of age attended Shanghai public schools. Students with Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) above 3 or 4 may attend public schools using Mandarin Chinese as the medium of instruction, while students below HSK 3–4 may attend international divisions of public schools or private international schools.
  Shanghai ranked first in the 2009 and 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a worldwide study of academic performance of 15-year-old students conducted by the OECD. Shanghai students, including migrant children, scored highest in every aspect (math, reading and science) in the world. The study concludes that public-funded schools in Shanghai have the highest educational quality in the world. Critics of PISA results counter that, in Shanghai and other Chinese cities, most children of migrant workers can only attend city schools up to the ninth grade, and must return to their parents' hometowns for high school due to hukou restrictions, thus skewing the composition of the city's high school students in favor of wealthier local families.
  The 2010 census shows that out of Shanghai's total population, 22.0% had a college education, double the level from 2000, while 21.0% had high school, 36.5% middle school, and 1.35% primary school education. 2.74% of residents age 15 and older were illiterate.
  As of 2011 Shanghai has more than 930 kindergartens, 1,200 primary and 850 middle schools. Over 760,000 middle schools students and 871,000 primary school students are taught by 76,000 and 64,000 teaching staff respectively.
  The city government has a financing scheme meant to spread resources to lower income areas by collecting taxes from all areas and then redistributing the money according to need.
caption: Shanghai Jiao Tong University Library
exif: {}