# **Section 5. Summary of findings and policy considerations**

Over the past decade, China’s transition rate from lower secondary education to higher secondary education has increased significantly, from 80.5 percent to 93.7 percent. This has been supported by a large increase in financial resources, at an annual rate of 15 percent between 2008 and 2015. The total financing for regular senior secondary schools has been growing faster. In 2008, school fees represented 20–30 percent of total school financing, but this ratio has fallen to 15 percent for regular schools and merely 6 percent for vocational schools—dwarfed by the fast increase in spending from government sources.

In light of this impressive progress, the Chinese government aimed at raising the GER in senior high schools to above 90 percent by 2020. “Average length of education received by the workingage population (years),” a target in the country’s 13th FYP, is also anticipated to increase from 10.23 years in 2015 to 10.8 years in 2020. Sixty percent of this increase is explained by upper secondary education, highlighting the critical role the subsector. Despite the impressive progress and ambitious goals, access gaps remain at the upper secondary school level, with only 77 percent of Chinese youth completing high school by age of 20, and for rural youth this ratio is only 47 percent. Quality and relevance in high school education could be a key bottleneck in further expansion.

High dropout rates for TVET programs—10.7 percent during the first year and up to 22 percent in some prefectures according to Yi et al. (2015)—suggest poor value added of certain vocational programs in terms of student learning, in addition to family background and other personal factors. From the attitude data collected in a Yunnan county, education administrators, students, and parents expressed their concerns about the teacher quality of vocational education. According to the background studies of World Bank-supported projects in China, the challenges can be described in the following five dimensions: (a) link between schools and industry; (b) teaching quality; (c) school management; (d) curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment; and (e) school facilities and equipment. Aside from the quality perceptions, a lack of career counseling among middle school graduates contributed to the uninformed decisions about which track students take.

As for the academic track, education incentives for the academic track are strongly driven by university entrance exams. However, exam-driven systems require a tremendous amount of student commitment both within and outside normal school hours, as evidenced by significant household costs on tutoring. Exam-driven systems can inhibit intrinsic motivation and stifle creativity. Such abilities are often gained beyond traditional classrooms and through extracurricular activities. The system of examination, ranking, selection, and promotion has often been viewed as meritocratic. However, the limitation of this system serving as a mechanism for social mobility is well recognized. Some curriculum reforms led to a few experiments on changing the university entrance exam. However, most of these changes have not lasted. In the meantime, there has been evidence of the positive effect of this curriculum reform on overall student wellbeing.

The tracking between academic and vocational streams could itself be a distortion for the sector’s further expansion. Among those who stay in upper secondary education, which track they pursue also determines their likelihood to enter further education. While vocational education provides a path for many youths with rural background to enter upper secondary education, it perpetuates the urban and rural divide. One mechanism is through fee difference. As vocational school becomes a 54