Teaching conditions improved in rural Yunnan

On September 7, Yang Jiahua drove to work after lunch. After more than 20 minutes, she passed a village named Zhilan in north Yunnan's Luquan County and arrived at Shuanghua Hope Primary School. She is a young English teacher here.

That afternoon, she was going to give an English lesson for a class of grade five. She planned to teach her students the interrogative sentence “where is”.

“Being an English teacher has always been my dream. I’d never planned to be a teacher in a rural school. However, here I am, a rural school teacher now, and I am doing pretty well,” said Yang Jiahua.

With the acceleration of the Chinese Central Government’s targeted poverty alleviation, Luquan County intensifies efforts to alleviate poverty through education. In 2016, 5,310 students were supported with funding amounting to 1.26 million US Dollars. Teachers’ income has been improved perceptibly at the same time. Yang Jiahua is one the youngest teachers in the school and her monthly income is over 1000 dollars.

“The policy ruled out my worries and I happily decided to teach in rural area.” She said that across the county there have been obvious improvements in teachers’ income, professional ranking, work environment and teaching facilities.

An official of the Luquan County Education Bureau said that the implementation of a subsistence allowance policy shows the concern and attention paid to the teachers in rural area by the Central Government. Since 2016, Luquan County has adopted subsidies for rural teachers in four categories according to their travel distance to school and their living conditions. Subsidies range from 100 to 300 dollars per month. 

“Now, the educational standards in rural schools in Luquan have been improved,” the principal of Shuanghua Hope Primary School, Li Guijun, told the reporter that in recent years, their school has attracted a group of excellent young teachers. At present, more than half of their teachers are under the age of 40.

By Pu Meiling; Editor: Eric Wang