Gansu puts AI on every school timetable: 8 class hours a year from autumn 2027

Gansu province in northwest China has ordered artificial intelligence onto the timetable of every primary and secondary school, setting a floor of eight class hours of AI-related instruction per academic year from the autumn term of 2027.

The requirement sits inside the Gansu Province "AI Plus Education" Action Plan (2026-2030), issued jointly by five departments: the provincial education department, the development and reform commission, the department of industry and information technology, the science and technology department and the provincial big data centre. It follows a national "AI Plus Education" action plan released earlier this year by China's Ministry of Education together with four other central departments.

The eight-hour annual minimum applies to upper primary grades, junior secondary and senior secondary. Vocational colleges must offer AI general-education courses across the full secondary-to-undergraduate vocational pathway, while universities are to build around ten provincial-level AI general-education courses reaching students in every major. AI literacy will be written into students' digital comprehensive-quality portfolios, and at least 30,000 students a year are expected to enter competitions including an AI innovation challenge staged under the provincial science and innovation contest.

By 2028 the province wants a curriculum and textbook system spanning all school stages, at least two city-wide pilot regions, 45 or more national and provincial AI education base schools, and 1,000 or more documented "AI Plus Education" use cases. By 2030 the provincial education network is to be upgraded to 40G bandwidth with no less than 100P of cloud computing capacity, teacher-AI collaborative instruction is to reach full coverage, and student use of AI study companions is to become routine.

Higher education carries its own numbers. During the 2026-2030 period Gansu plans to add around 20 AI-related academic programmes and upgrade roughly 200 existing ones, build about 200 provincial smart courses, and certify some 500 digital-leadership mentors supported by 15 or more expert advisory teams. AI is to become either a compulsory public course or a designated elective at universities, with optional minors and micro-credentials where institutions can support them.

Teacher capacity is the other half of the plan. It promotes "dual-teacher" co-teaching in which large models assist with lesson planning, homework marking, personalised Q&A, classroom behaviour assessment and evidence-based teaching research, and it sets a target of running AI teaching-capability diagnostics online for more than 10,000 young teachers each year. AI literacy and technology ethics are to be folded into pre-service teacher training and into teacher qualification examinations, and AI teaching output is to count in professional title reviews and performance appraisal.

On the supply side, the plan calls for a provincial education computing platform combining supercomputing and intelligent computing, an upgraded "cloud-network-edge-device" infrastructure and smart classroom retrofits. It supports purchases of AI laboratory equipment for junior and senior secondary schools, and encourages universities and university science parks to incubate education AI companies and co-develop vertical education models, intelligent learning terminals and virtual simulation training systems.

Funding will be assembled from several existing central and provincial subsidy lines, including programmes for weak compulsory-education schools, senior secondary school conditions, county high school strengthening and university reform. A dynamic monitoring mechanism will track teaching outcomes, and "AI Plus Education" performance will be written into the evaluation of local governments' delivery of their education responsibilities, with results tied to resource allocation and project approval. The plan also sets governance safeguards covering technical, data, content, algorithmic and ethical security, including a filing system for AI applications entering campuses and periodic review of models that affect students, teachers and schools.