The “15th Five-Year Plan” for education development is released, advancing artificial intelligence education across all grade levels

On June 29, the “Education Development ‘14th Five-Year Plan’ to ‘15th Five-Year Plan’” Plan (hereinafter the “Plan”) was released. It targets the goal of building China into an education powerhouse by 2035, fully considers important era variables such as population structure and artificial intelligence (AI), and deploys a series of major strategic tasks, major policy measures, and major engineering projects. It serves as a link to the “Outline for the Construction of an Education Powerhouse (2024–2035)” and continues the mid-term core blueprint of the “Three-Year Action Plan to Accelerate the Construction of an Education Powerhouse (2025–2027)”. Across dimensions such as expanding higher education, upgrading vocational education, “AI+education”, and regional education layout, the Plan releases multiple policy dividends.

The Plan’s overall framework follows the approach of “building the blueprint by major objectives as the driver, strategic tasks as the command, the overall planning as coordination, comprehensive reform as breakthrough, and major projects as support”. It consists of five sections. It clearly proposes: by 2030, the construction of an education powerhouse will achieve notable results, and a high-quality education system will be basically in place.

The Plan also specifies multiple quantifiable indicators. For example, the number of undergraduate admissions in “Double First-Class” universities will increase by more than 100k. Meanwhile, it will establish several new-type research universities mainly focusing on science, engineering, agriculture, and medicine. It will orderly expand the scale of quality undergraduate and graduate training. Resource allocation will be tilted toward populous provinces, the central and western regions, and ethnic areas. In terms of fiscal guarantees, national fiscal spending on education as a proportion of GDP will be maintained at above 4%, and it will optimize the evaluation method of the “two ensure that gains and does not decrease” mechanism while strengthening provincial-level overall coordination.

Digitalization and educational technology are a major highlight of this Plan. In the section on “promoting the transformation of education toward intelligent and digital transformation”, it explicitly calls for a deep implementation of the national education digitization strategy, launching an “artificial intelligence + education” initiative, building national AI (education) application pilot-and-testing bases, and implementing a national program to empower key-language technology fields. In addition, in the “deepening education evaluation reform” section, it explicitly proposes exploring the use of AI and big data to empower education evaluation. Combined with the statements in “enhancing students’ abilities and literacy”, such as promoting AI education across all schooling stages and improving students’ AI literacy, it suggests that sub-sectors such as AI education hardware, education foundation models, smart classrooms, and education data governance may become key beneficiary directions of “new education infrastructure”.

In terms of implementation pathways supporting science and talent, higher education and vocational education are both strengthened. For higher education, the Plan clarifies that it will promote higher education to improve quality and expand capacity. It will expand the supply of high-quality higher education resources through multiple channels, with newly added higher education resources appropriately tilted toward populous provinces, the central and western regions, and ethnic areas. It will continuously improve basic conditions for running schools, such as student dormitories in universities. It will solidly promote the expansion of quality undergraduate education, and support the construction of new campuses for several “Double First-Class” universities, with the number of undergraduate admissions in “Double First-Class” universities increasing by more than 100k. It will establish several new-type research universities and orderly expand the scale of quality undergraduate admissions and graduate training, mainly in science, engineering, agriculture, and medicine. It will optimize and implement special plans for university admissions serving rural revitalization.

For vocational education, the Plan proposes accelerating the construction of a modern vocational education system and vigorously cultivating great craftspeople, skilled workers, and high-skill talent. It will advance seamless education and training across secondary vocational, higher vocational, and vocational bachelor education, and steadily increase the number of vocational undergraduate schools and expand enrollment scale. It will encourage leading industry enterprises to run or participate in running vocational schools.

For regional layout, the Plan requires strengthening education regional arrangements that support major national strategies. It will support the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area to accelerate the building of world-class regional higher education centers. It will complete high-quality the phased tasks for relieving non-capital functions in Beijing in the education sector, and promote relocated universities to achieve innovative development in Xiong’an New Area. It will further advance the construction of Hainan’s International Education Innovation Island. It will promote integrated educational development in the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle. It will facilitate coordinated education development along the upstream, midstream, and downstream sections of the Yangtze River Economic Belt and the Yellow River basin. It will deepen exchanges and cooperation in education between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, and support Fujian in building a high-quality model area for integrated development between the two sides. It will support Hong Kong and Macao to leverage their unique advantages to serve the construction of an education powerhouse, support Hong Kong in building an international innovation and technology center, and support Hong Kong and Macao in creating international high-end talent clustering hubs. It will improve the paired assistance mechanisms between universities in the east, central and western regions.

Ma Xiaoqiang, director of the Institute of Education Statistics and Analysis at the China Academy of Educational Sciences, believes that this education development five-year plan has distinct characteristics of the times. First, the optimization and allocation of educational resources extends to the entire education field. Second, it considers in all directions the impact of artificial intelligence on education.

[Author: Jiang Dan] (Editor: Wen Jing)

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