# Xi Stresses Developing Basic Education, Urging Fostering of Virtue and Well-Rounded Students > At a national conference in Beijing, Xi Jinping instructed that the Party's education policy be fully carried out and virtue-fostering made the fundamental task, nurturing well-rounded students, as basic education shifts from expanding access to raising quality. - Source: Times of China (Times of China) - Canonical URL: https://timesofchina.cn.com/en/article/xi-basic-education-development - Chinese edition: https://timesofchina.cn.com/article/xi-basic-education-development - Author: 中国时报编辑部 - Section: Education - Published: 2026-07-23T16:00:00+08:00 - Updated: 2026-07-23T16:00:00+08:00 - Tags: 基础教育, 立德树人, 教育公平, 教育改革, 习近平 --- A national conference on basic education was held recently in Beijing. Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, the country's president and chairman of the Central Military Commission, gave an important instruction on basic education work. He stressed the need to fully implement the Party's education policy, carry through the fundamental task of fostering virtue, and work to nurture builders and successors with well-rounded development in moral grounding, intellectual capability, physical vigor, aesthetic sensibility and work skills. Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang attended the conference and conveyed the instruction. The instruction described basic education as the cornerstone of the national education system, bound up with hundreds of millions of families and with the future of the country. It called for following the laws of education and of how talent grows, keeping a health-first principle, and pushing on quality and fairness at the same time. ## Quality at the center The instruction stressed that the focus of basic education is shifting from expanding access to raising quality. The priority is to lift the standard of schools and of teaching, to help students grow up healthy in body and mind, and to keep educational equity running through everything, so that more children can get a better education close to home. To that end, the conference called for deepening comprehensive reform of basic education and moving toward student-centered teaching, while managing admissions and enrollment in an orderly way. A healthier environment for growing up and more sensible ways of assessment were treated as going together, rather than simply shifting the burden of schoolwork onto families. ## Teachers and resources The instruction called for building a high-quality, professional teaching workforce, and for letting teachers commit to the profession with peace of mind. It also called for optimizing the allocation of educational resources so they better fit changes in the population structure and in the balance between cities and the countryside, directing limited resources to where they are needed most. The conference further called for coordinating the efforts of schools, families and society into a shared effort to raise children well. Basic education is not the work of schools alone. The involvement of families and the support of society are equally essential to a child's healthy growth. ## Attention to every child On fairness, the instruction singled out protecting the equal right to education of children left behind in rural areas and children who move to cities with migrant worker parents. It called for promoting high-quality and balanced development in basic education, so that no child falls behind because of where they were born or where they live. That means resource allocation has to become more precise. As people concentrate in certain cities and regions, some rural schools face shrinking enrollment while places in destination areas grow tight. How to adjust dynamically and balance both ends is the practical challenge ahead. ## From scale to quality Over a longer horizon, basic education in China has changed markedly in the past decade or so. Since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, basic education has been placed among the priorities for development, and China has built the world's largest basic education system. With the question of access to school largely resolved, running that vast system better has become the new theme. By the common definition, basic education in China covers preschool, the nine-year compulsory stage of elementary and junior high school, and standard senior high school. This system spans the most formative stage of a person's life, and its quality bears directly on the growth of hundreds of millions of future students and on the country's long-term competitiveness. --- Originally published by Times of China. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://timesofchina.cn.com/en/article/xi-basic-education-development.