Rural schools promise to leave no single kid behind

For the past month, my wife and I have been living in my village in Fuyuan, China's easternmost city, in Heilongjiang province, to escape Beijing's summer heat. During our routine daily walks, we often passed a village school, a few hundred meters from Wusulijiang, a river along the China-Russia border.

As a former researcher of comparative education, my wife suggested we go in and take a look.

The campus was empty as the summer vacation was on. The only faculty member present there was friendly. He not only allowed us in but also showed us around. The school has a four-story academic building with about a dozen classrooms.

It has a football field covered with artificial turf and surrounded by a synthetic 200-meter racetrack apart from a playground for basketball and other sports.

"Guess how many students we have," our guide asked us with a smile. We knew that the number of students in China's rural schools had been dwindling for some years now, and the dip could be sharper in this sparsely populated frontier area.

Before I could say there might be around 100 students, our guide answered his question himself: "Nine students in nine grades from primary to junior high. And we have more than 20 faculty members."

The next second, I found myself shutting my eyes and mouth as I did a quick mental calculation to conclude that the local government was spending a few million yuan each year to cover the faculty's salary and operational costs to ensure the nine students got their compulsory education.

Such a big investment in the few students' education displayed the people-centered approach of the Chinese government. No one should be left behind.

On the other hand, to speak honestly, maintaining rural schools for a shrinking student population is becoming a significant challenge for many local governments in the country.

These governments need to adopt practical, down-to-earth measures to reduce education costs and ensure sustainability.

In the past three decades or so, about 300 million rural residents have moved to the cities and counties in search of better-paying jobs. Many of them took their children along for better educational opportunities in the cities and counties.

As a result, the rural schools are seeing a dramatic outflow of students. Statistics show that from 2018 to 2023, the number of rural primary school students decreased by 31 percent. That means millions of rural students have left their rural schools.

The school we visited, for instance, once hosted several hundred students from nearby villages. Now that about one-third of the households in the village have moved to the urban areas with their children, the dwindling of the village school was anything but unexpected.

Most of the villagers I spoke to said they would rather send their children to boarding schools in the headquarters of Fuyuan city 50 kilometers away rather than the next-door village school.

If the children are too young, they even arrange to rent an apartment in the city and send the mother or grandparents to stay with the kids.

For many years now, an increasing number of village schools have been shutting down as students move to the so-called central schools — the school in my village being one of them — for compulsory education. Now, even these central schools are finding it difficult to survive as fewer students enroll each year.

The No. 1 Central Document released in February 2026 has emphasized the need to strengthen the coordinated provision of basic public services in county areas.

The document calls for the careful optimization of the layout of rural primary and secondary schools and kindergartens, ensuring the retention and effective operation of necessary small-scale rural schools and kindergartens.

It also proposes the implementation of a county-level high school revitalization action plan, the promotion of urban-rural school community construction, and the strengthening of coordinated allocation of teachers within counties.

Additionally, it encourages the online sharing of quality classes between urban and rural schools and calls for comprehensive measures to increase efforts in preventing school dropouts and ensuring education retention in rural areas.

The document points the right direction.

Effective problem-solving measures — such as teacher-exchange programs, long-distance education, and predesigned small-scale rural school models — should be studied and implemented to get rural schools out of the condition they find themselves in now.

The author is former deputy editor-in-chief of China Daily.