Change in Rural Areas 8 School Mapping and Boarding in the Context of Demographic
music and other subjects may not be cost effective to provide where their utilisa-
tion patterns will be low. In areas where population density is low there may be
no choice but to plan schools with boarding facilities to avoid very long journey
times. Schools which are large enough to include children from different commu-
nities can play a role in promoting social cohesion.
In the earlier years after the funding of the New China in 1949, rural educa-
tion was very backward with most of the peasants were illiterate. In 1949, there
were only 346,800 primary schools with school enrolment of 24,391 million pri-
mary students and school size averaged 140 children. The enrolment rate of school
age children for primary education rate was only about 50 % (Wu 1992 ). School
mapping was regarded as the key to universal compulsory education. The princi-
ple was to promote going to nearby schools in rural areas. The state put forward
the guideline that “every village set up a primary school, every commune set up a
secondary school” and “Going to primary schools without going out of the village
(cun), going to junior secondary school without going out of the pian (a group of
villages), going to senior high school without going out of the commune (she)”.
The goal was to make access to education universal with extensive coverage of
primary and secondary schools even if this meant many were small. This led to
every village having a primary school or small size teaching point.
The Nine Year Compulsory Education Law indicated in 1986 that “Local peo-
ple’s governments should reasonably make school layout plans for primary and
junior secondary schools that enable children to go to school nearby and in the
neighborhood”. The school layout policy was mainly to ensure basic access and
convenient schooling opportunities, this needed certain number of schools and
reasonable distribution. Between 1988 and 1998, the number of primary schools
increased from 600,000 to 800,000 (Wu and Shi 2011 ).
There are three types of primary schools in rural areas. The first type is cen-
tral primary school which is a complete primary school with grade 1–6, usually
located in the town of a township. It has administrative function over other pri-
mary schools under its umbrella in the area. Secondly there are some complete pri-
mary schools with grade 1–6 which fall under the central primary school. Thirdly,
to accommodate the situation in remote and mountainous areas with scattered pop-
ulations, there are incomplete schools with only grade 1–3. There are a few teach-
ers and one or two classes normally using multi-grade teaching strategy. By 2000,
more than one third of the rural primary schools were incomplete schools (Wu and
Shi 2011 ). Usually each township has one junior secondary school. Senior sec-
ondary schools are normally in the county town. This pattern of school layout has
played important role in universal compulsory education in rural China. Under the
principles, a large number of primary and secondary schools were set up in rural
areas. Taking Daxing county of Beijing as an example, by 1978 there were 440
primary schools, 15 for each township in average, 73 junior secondary schools, 2.5
for each township in average (Zhao 2013 ).
The pattern of school layout, location and distribution of schools in rural areas
has been changing in the recent decades as a result of the decline in the school age
population in rural areas. This is the result of the one-child policy and urbanization