In July 2010, the Chinese government published the Outline of the National Medium and Long Term Education Reform and Development Plan (2010-2020). It proposed to improve the teacher training system, to include the funds for teacher training in the government budget, and to implement a five-year full-staff training plan for teachers.
The promulgation of the Outline is mainly due to Chinese rapid development after the reform and opening up, which give rise to series problems,such as the unreasonable
structure and layout of education, the unbalanced development of urban and rural and regional education, the backward development of education in poverty-stricken areas and ethnic minority areas. And these problems are challenges for the development goal of "developing education and building a strong human resource country" that be proposed by the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (the 17th CPC National Congress) in October 2007. Therefore, as a specific plan to solve the above problems and an important measure to achieve the development goals of the 17th CPC National Congress, in 2010, "focusing on rural teachers, large-scale teacher training should be organized by classifying, stratifying, assigning posts and dividing subjects, so as to improve the overall quality of primary and secondary school teachers in an all-round way", the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance of China launched the National Teacher Training Program for Primary and Secondary School Teachers.
In this program, aiming at the weak situation of teachers' training in rural areas of central and Western of China, the central government has arranged a special fund since 2010 to organize professional training activities for backbone teachers of rural compulsory education in central and western provinces every spring so as to train a group of backbone teachers who should play an exemplary role in implementing curriculum reform, quality education and teacher training to promote the development of compulsory education in rural areas of the Midwest areas, and then achieve the equitable and balanced development of compulsory education5. As a result, the "Training Project of the Rural backbone Teacher in the Midwest areas"[Teacher Training Midwest Project (TTMP)] came into being.
The implementation of the Midwest Project adopted the Project System as "a governance mode "(Qu, 2005, p.114)6, which specifically applies tendering and bidding systems7 to carry out training activities for rural primary and secondary school teachers in central and western areas of China.
The implementation scope of this project covers primary and secondary schools in rural areas of central and Western of China, including the following provinces in the table 3:
Table 3 Provinces of the implementation of TTMP
Areas Provinces Remarks
Central Shanxi, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan, Hubei and Hunan
Western Sichuan, Chongqing, Guizhou, Yunnan, Tibet, Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, Xinjiang,
Guangxi and Inner Mongolia
Including Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps Source: The Notice of the Office of the Ministry of Education and the Office of the Ministry of Finance on Organizing the 2010 "National Teacher Training Program" - the Declaration and Publication of Project Tendering Guidelines for TTMP
In this table, rural areas, according to the criteria of the broad-sense divisions of rural areas in China (Zhang Shi-sen, 2013, p.3)8, includes counties, towns, villages and towns, and combined districts.
Furthermore, concerning the reality that teachers, especially backbone teachers, in the Midwest rural areas, have faced difficulties in participating in training activities because of their limited time and quantity (Sun Jian & Chen Yan-hua, 2010;
Tang Na & Song Chao, 2012)9, their un-replaced posts (Li Ze-min & Cai Ming-qin, 2012)10, and inconvenience of transportation (Li Chang-juan, 2015)11 etc. Thus, the implementation of TTMP aims to replace rural backbone teachers with supported urban teachers and seniors of normal colleges and universities to participate in long-term centralized training, which firstly formed sub-project of Replacement of Full-time Training by the way of on-the-post internship (Wu & Zhang, 2011)12. Secondly, considering situation of the unreasonable subjects structure, weak bases of teachers in some subjects and lower teaching level in the rural schools of Midwest areas (e.g., Yu Wei, Li Guang-ping, Qin Yu-you, & Li Bai-ling, 2007; Liu Jian-long, 2009)13, substance of the project has been clearly defined as "subjects training of teachers rather than theoretical training, emphasizing full coverage"(Song Yang-gang, 2010, August 21)14. Therefore, the sub-project of short-term intensive training was established for rural backbone teachers of various subjects, to improve teaching level on their subjects. Thirdly, because of the requirements of TTMP for the training of all
rural teachers in the Midwest areas, meanwhile, considering the practical constraints of contradictions between work and study, training funds and limited resource of trainers (Mou Yan-na, 2011)15, the sub-project of distance training was set up for all rural teachers to train in a certain amount of hours of online courses, thus improving the teaching level of the rural schools in the Midwest areas. Specifically, the training targets in the three sub-projects are shown in the table 4:
Table 4 Training objects of TTMP form 2010 to 2014
No. Sub-project name Training object Remarks
01 Replacement of full-time
training The backbone teachers in the rural primary and secondary schools
In principle, the age of trainees should not exceed 45 years 02 Short-term intensive training The backbone teachers
of various subjects in the rural primary and secondary schools
It mainly focuses on the training for
teachers of weak subjects in
rural schools 03 Distance training Teachers in the rural
primary and secondary schools
The whole teacher in rural schools Source: The Circular of the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance on the Implementation of the National Teacher Training Program for Primary and Secondary School Teachers (2010).
Note: In the No.1 and No.2, the proportion of rural teachers came from township level in the total number of teachers participating in training is not less than two-thirds.
In the above table, the training objects of the first sub-project are the backbone teachers who have been engaged in front-line teaching tasks of main subjects for a long time in county-level primary and secondary schools, secondary schools of township and village primary schools. And specific selection of rural backbone teachers is based on the relevant policies issued by various provinces. The second sub-project focuses on the training of backbone teachers in weak subjects such
as music, sports, arts, science, information technology, general technology and comprehensive practical activities, and mental health education in rural schools, and training of some backbone teachers in major subjects such as Chinese, mathematics and English. The third sub-project ,namely distance training, mainly uses modern distance network to do training for all the teachers of primary and secondary schools in rural areas of central and Western provinces.
From the perspective of the scope and content of the project in this period, the Chinese government began to carry out large-scale training activities for rural teachers of primary and secondary school, which means that the guarantee of rural teachers' training rights began to be implemented.