Zhang Yu JeniZhang13@163.com SHENZHEN will offer nearly 1 million additional places for school students by 2025, according to a press conference held by the Shenzhen Municipal Government Information Office at the Civic Center in Futian District on Thursday. The vision was proposed in the city’s implementation guidelines on speeding up the construction of school places and promoting the high-quality development of basic education, which have set the tone for Shenzhen’s new round of efforts to improve the quality of basic education. The guidelines make it clear that 740,000 school places for public compulsory education and 145,000 kindergarten places will be added in Shenzhen by 2025, as per the conference. In addition to the 97,000 new school places for public high school education that are already in the pipeline, nearly 1 million school places will be added in Shenzhen in the next five years. The objectives will be achieved in two phases. In the first phase (2020-2022), Shenzhen will add 290,000 school places for public compulsory education and 60,000 kindergarten places. In the second phase (2023-2025), the city will add 450,000 school places for public compulsory education and 85,000 kindergarten places. Bao’an District, which has 506,000 on-campus students accounting for nearly a quarter of the city’s total, will add 207,500 school places for public compulsory education. Cai Yingquan, executive deputy district chief of Bao’an, said at the conference that Bao’an will divide the task into two stages, specifically, 2020-2022 and 2023-2025. The district will give priority to the State-owned reserve land, newly available land, stock land and idle land for school planning and construction, said Cai. According to the guidelines, the city is planning to add 100 hectares of land for educational uses. According to Chen Qiuming, head of the city’s education bureau, the next five years will usher in a peak of school construction. It is estimated that 50,000 to 60,000 teachers will be recruited.
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