Beijing, China, 17 July 2017 – The UNESCO International Research and Training Centre for Rural Education (INRULED) and the Smart Learning Institute (SLI) of Beijing Normal University co-organised a forum on Education and Rural Development – ICT’s role in enhancing the quality of rural education . Aiming to review the progress and bottlenecks Chinese rural education has encountered in its development pathway, and share practices of employing ICT in education across the remote rural areas in China, the forum engaged more than 20 renowned researchers, scholars and policy-makers in the field of education and poverty alleviation.

Group photo of the participating experts

In order to set the floor for discussion, Dr. Zhao Yuchi, Office Director of INRULED, introduced the development history, mission, main research areas and achievements of the centre, and explained the background and purpose of the forum. After the presentations, experience sharing and discussions, the forum generated fruitful outcomes around the topics of public-private educational partnerships, the importance of piloting the new ICT approaches in rural education prior to its implementation, the targeted measures in poverty alleviation, rural education’s policy design and implementation cycle, and last but not least, how digitalised education systems can support the left-behind children in rural China.

Site of the forum

The participating experts highly upheld the idea of sharing the Chinese experience of rural education development with other developing countries, and put forward some suggestions on the framework proposed by Dr. Huang Ronghuai, Director of INRULED. Based on the discussions throughout the forum, INRULED will design and initiate the writing of a series of reports in order to present the Chinese perspective on the implementation of the international education agenda. Besides, the summoned case studies as well as experts’ remarks are stored in INRULED’s qualitative data bank for future global data sharing across various platforms.

Furthermore, based on the discussions and cases shared at the forum, two articles were published on China’s Education Daily (Zhong Guo Jiao Yu Bao) and Xinhua Net, which broadcast the meeting outcomes in a widespread way.