PRESCHOOL education will be strengthened over the next 10 years, by lending more weight to financial input, rural preschool education, kindergarten management and building teaching staff to enhance preschool education.

    The city will do its best to develop public kindergartens, encourage social entities to open kindergartens, give a preferential support to rural preschool education and step up the management of preschool education institutions.

    The city aims to have more than 97 percent of its children educated at kindergartens by 2015 and raise the percentage to over 99 percent by 2020.

    The deputy head of the city’s education bureau, Zhou Minshu, said the city would allocate special funds to guarantee the development of preschool education.

    A total of 50 million yuan will be spent this year to subsidize city kindergartens, support the development of rural kindergartens and train kindergarten heads and teachers.

    In addition, the city will build and expand more than 150 town and subdistrict kindergartens this year.

    (Li Hao, Liu Miao)