Create a high-quality特色brand school

Source text from: Liangshan Daily

Meeting the Innovation-Based Student Development Model in Huili

Building High-Quality Schools with Distinctive Brand Identity

□ Peng Wanxiang, Text/Photos

The No. 1 Primary School in Huili is located inside the ancient city of Huili. It covers an area of 25 mu, with 34 teaching classes, 1,702 students, and 86 teachers. It offers 2 ethnic boarding classes, serving 100 boarding students. As one of the first batch of key ethnic boarding schools in Liangshan Prefecture, the school continuously innovates its student development model, keeps polishing the regional brand of quality education, and works hard to ensure that every child achieves lively, healthy, and happy development.

Build the school on quality, and earn a good reputation with strength. The school always treats quality as the lifeline of education, focusing on enhancing teaching and striving for excellence in improving quality with concerted efforts. In the assessment of teaching quality for primary and secondary schools in Liangshan Prefecture, the school won the first prize in the 2025 primary education teaching quality assessment, demonstrating the profound meaning of “building the school on quality” with its实力, and earning widespread praise from parents and society. Parents even sent in banners in person to express their gratitude.

Develop the school through特色, and brighten the brand with sports. Physical education is the school’s most standout distinctive feature. The school adheres to the philosophy of “health first.” Its graduates’ physical education academic performance continues to lead in Huili City. Its sunshine sports big-break activities have successively won second- and third-level prizes in Sichuan Province, and in 2025 it was successfully selected among the top 30 provincial-level excellent cases, becoming one of the exemplary models for primary school physical education work across the province. In the first Huili City primary and middle school ball games meeting, more than 40 athletes won multiple awards such as soccer and basketball. Teachers and students throughout the school have accumulated more than 200 award-winning participations in competitions and performances at various levels and types.

Educate through the environment, and nourish the heart with craftsmanship. The school adheres to the concept of “educating through the environment,” continuously improving its conditions for running the school and equipping all kinds of functional classrooms. It provides each teacher with an office computer and purchases multiple educational and teaching resources. With distinctive ingenuity, it creates nurturing spaces: it decorates the corridors of the teaching building into a “sky garden” where countless flowers bloom in view—designed so that azaleas, camellias, orchids/grass (兰草), and other blossoms bloom in sequence, letting the scent of books and the fragrance of flowers grow together and nourish each other; it plans and builds a rooftop planting garden to cultivate fruit and vegetable crops such as blueberries and strawberries. By deeply integrating flower care, fruit and vegetable planting, and labor education, it achieves an organic unity of practical functions, aesthetic education value, and labor practice.

Strengthen teachers to promote education, and lay a solid foundation with professionalism. The school uses the “Qinglan Project” as a link to carry out mentor-mentee pairings in a solid manner, helping young teachers grow rapidly. It routinely carries out teaching-and-research activities such as school-based professional development, different designs for the same lesson (“one course, different structures”), and “getting close to peers” classes, creating a strong atmosphere of mutual learning and progress together. It improves mechanisms for assessment and evaluation, promotion of professional titles, and so on, to stimulate teachers’ internal drive. Vice Principal Kang Huiren won first prize (in the primary school group) in the 2025 Huili City primary and middle school “Big Competition” for Party secretary and principal ideological-and-political lessons, showcasing the teachers’ strong capabilities.

Put students first, and promote development through diversity. The school adheres to the “five educations in parallel” approach, and deeply promotes the construction of a campus filled with reading. It ensures full coverage of classroom book corners, and regularly holds activities such as selecting reading-themed classes, reading classic works aloud, and sharing good books. It innovatively builds the distinctive reading brand “8:00 p.m. each night, listen to No. 1 Primary School.” It insists on writing practice for 15 minutes every day at lunchtime to nourish the mind with brush and ink. It integrates labor education into daily life by relying on the planting garden. And with “Show and Showcase Every Monday” talent displays and thriving after-school service club activities, it provides every student with a stage to showcase themselves and develop their individuality.

Unity among ethnic groups, and build confidence through culture. As a prefecture-level model collective for unity among ethnic groups, the school devotes itself to ethnic culture education, continuously optimizes the management of ethnic classes, and integrates outstanding local Yi culture, red culture, green pottery culture, pomegranate culture, and others into classroom teaching and campus activities. It guides students to strengthen their sentiments for the country and their cultural confidence as they are influenced by culture, helping students of all ethnic groups move forward with one heart and grow together.

The No. 1 Primary School in Huili City has rich experience in precise management, courageous innovation, caring for teachers and students, and deep cultivation of distinctive school features. It offers useful references for primary schools in ethnic minority areas. The school principal, Gao Zirong, said that the school will continue to uphold its educational mission, advancing firmly toward the goal of “empowering education through precise management to nurture students, advancing together with steadfast dedication to create first-class excellence,” and work hard to build a higher-quality, more distinctive, and warmer high-quality primary school for the new era.