College authorized to train preschool principals

The Tianhua College of the Shanghai Normal University has been authorized by the Shanghai Education Commission to train local kindergarten principals as part of its strategy to improve quality of preschool education in the city.

The university said it plans to train 100 kindergarten principals within the next four months. 

The training, online and offline, is expected to help them better understand China’s policies on preschool education and improve their domestic and international outlook.

The training is part of Shanghai’s efforts to serve the demand for higher-quality preschool education.

With a relaxed family planning policy, Shanghai is seeing increasing new births and the city has planned to build or expand 90 kindergartens by 2020 and add about 2,000 kindergarten teachers each year.

Last year, local universities saw only 520 preschool-education graduates with bachelor’s degrees.

The authority has encouraged local universities to set up preschool education majors or increase admissions.

By 2020, the admission number of students in the major will reach 3,000 and the kindergarten staff in Shanghai will increase by 10 percent to about 730,000.

Meanwhile, the education authority has planned to increase the percentage of kindergarten teachers with bachelor’s or higher degrees to 80 percent, up 10 percentage points from now.

The Tianhua college launched its preschool education major in 2006 and has become an important base for cultivating teachers for local kindergartens. In the past 13 years, it has cultivated more than 1,500 kindergarten teachers.

The college has also established partnerships with the University of Alabama, Illinois State University, Northern Arizona University and Western Oregon University to teach 100 doctorate students.