A healthy educational atmosphere is part of the history of Yangquan, where learning is a glory, teachers are respected, and students are oriented by schools. Yangquan's armed with a good mechanism to prioritize education, maintain comprehensive policy support, prioritize safeguards, and ensure teachers' welfare. In a spirit of exploration and innovation, the city has created its own growth pattern of inter-school cooperation in which older schools help younger ones and in which teaching is done in accordance with students' aptitudes.

These years, inclusive preschool education resources have been intensified and have resulted in growing benefits from preschool education. The new reconstruction and expansion of public kindergartens and the recognition of inclusive private ones have brought remarkable results.

Compulsory education has achieved initial results in high-quality and balanced development and the goal of ensuring good compulsory education for school-age children and adolescents. The gap between urban and rural areas and between schools has been narrowed. In 2015, all the five counties (districts) under the jurisdiction were certified as having balanced development of national compulsory education; Yangquan was one of the first cities to reach that standard. It consequently was awarded the honorary title of "Advanced City to Promote the Balanced Development of Compulsory Education" by the Education Steering Committee of the provincial government.

As the quality of senior high school education has risen through over ten years of consolidation and development, Yangquan has basically realized the objective of balanced, coordinated and sustainable development, which is reflected in the balanced level of distribution of schools, of faculty structure, of school operations, and of the schools qualities. 2018 was another year of excellent results in the college entrance examination, where seven students were admitted to Tsinghua University and Peking University, and the percentage of students (liberal arts and sciences) accepted by the first-tier and second-tier universities reached 36.08%, ranking among the top in Shanxi.

Vocational education and the higher education system are similarly developing well. The newly-built Yangquan Vocational and Technical College, the Shanxi Institute of Technology and Yangquan Teachers College together constitute the pattern of "one regular college and two junior colleges" of higher vocational education in the city. Yangquan Vocational and Technical College is strengthening school-enterprise cooperation through new majors for emerging industries and modern service industries. The "Butterfly Plan" of Yangquan Polytechnic School of Communication also has new ways of ensuring school-enterprise cooperation and the ability of vocational education to serve local economic and social development.