The Shanxi Department of Education on April 5 announced a plan for the development of education in North China's Shanxi province during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25).

During this period, Shanxi will promote the high-quality development of basic education, set up vocational schools for undergraduates, and focus on the high-quality development of higher education.

The province will renovate and expand 500 public kindergartens to promote pre-school education, further structural adjustment and layout optimization of urban and rural basic education schools to promote the balanced development of urban and rural basic education, optimize the layout and structure of high schools and deepen the reform of education to expand comprehensive practice channels for high school students.

Schools in urban areas will be encouraged to operate in groups or to form school-running alliances to promote the regional sharing of high-quality educational resources.

The province also plans to speed up the construction of a modern vocational education system. 

It will adjust and optimize the layout structure of vocational schools, gradually adjust the number of secondary vocational schools to about 320, build three undergraduate vocational schools and set up 50 provincial-level high-level secondary vocational schools. A pilot program for five-year higher vocational education will be carried out in provincial high-level secondary vocational schools.

The province will also give priority to the development of Shanxi University, Taiyuan University of Technology, and North University of China, and let key colleges and universities develop more than 50 emerging and interdisciplinary majors and around 30 majors related to carbon neutrality, and adjust and optimize more than 50 majors to make emerging and application-oriented undergraduate majors account over 60 percent of the total.

In addition, Shanxi will build a higher education innovation zone in its central city cluster and a pilot zone for the integration of production and higher education in southern, northern and southeastern Shanxi, and focus on the construction of science and engineering colleges and universities.