Henan Sets 2030 Goal of Universal AI Education in Primary and Secondary Schools
Four Henan provincial bodies — the Department of Education, the Department of Science and Technology, the Department of Industry and Information Technology, and the Henan Association for Science and Technology — have jointly issued the Implementation Opinion on Advancing AI Education and Applications in Primary and Secondary Schools, setting out how the province will roll out AI teaching over the rest of the decade.
The opinion sets three milestones. By 2026, schools with the capacity to do so will be supported in pioneering AI courses and building a first batch of high-quality application cases. By 2028, more than 60% of primary and secondary schools should be able to deliver AI education effectively, with typical applications spanning teaching, learning, management, assessment and research. By 2030, AI education is to be universal across the province’s primary and secondary schools.
On curriculum, Henan will draw up a provincial AI education outline and differentiate by stage: lower primary grades focus on perception and cognition, upper primary and junior secondary on understanding and application, and senior secondary on project-based inquiry and frontier technologies. In compulsory education, grades 1–2 will integrate AI across subjects, grades 3–8 will fold it into the information technology curriculum and grade 9 into school-based courses, while senior high will place it within the compulsory IT course, with a floor of 10 class hours per academic year.
Pedagogically the province is pushing task-based, project-based and problem-based learning, alongside a teaching-research mechanism described as "provincial coordination, city-county linkage, school-level implementation." Schools are encouraged to form AI clubs, run campus science festivals and organise study activities, while an AI education zone with domain-specific agents will be deployed on the Henan Smart Education Platform.
On applications, the opinion calls for AI to be embedded in personalised learning and interactive inquiry, with pilots of AI learning companions; subject-wide AI teaching assistants for human-machine co-planning; and intelligent marking, Q&A and tutoring. It also promotes AI-assisted item writing, test assembly and grading, and a data-enabled student competency evaluation system.
The guardrails are the most quotable part of the document. The opinion explicitly forbids turning smart technology into a tool for rote exam drilling, bars students from using AI to complete homework, and requires that deployments avoid adding to teachers’ workload or students’ academic burden — a notable stance as Chinese authorities grapple with AI’s classroom role.
Support measures include upgrading campus networks and smart teaching terminals, making AI education laboratories a priority within smart and digital campus programmes, and opening university, research institute and enterprise AI labs to school students. AI will become mandatory content in teacher training at all levels, with a multi-department coordination mechanism, an expert pool, an enterprise resource pool and a full-chain security framework covering data, content, technology, algorithms and models.
The provincial targets sit under a national framework: in April 2026 five central departments, including the Ministry of Education, issued the "AI Plus Education" Action Plan, which calls for deep AI-education integration by 2030 and a full-chain AI literacy system across all school stages.
The opinion sets three milestones. By 2026, schools with the capacity to do so will be supported in pioneering AI courses and building a first batch of high-quality application cases. By 2028, more than 60% of primary and secondary schools should be able to deliver AI education effectively, with typical applications spanning teaching, learning, management, assessment and research. By 2030, AI education is to be universal across the province’s primary and secondary schools.
On curriculum, Henan will draw up a provincial AI education outline and differentiate by stage: lower primary grades focus on perception and cognition, upper primary and junior secondary on understanding and application, and senior secondary on project-based inquiry and frontier technologies. In compulsory education, grades 1–2 will integrate AI across subjects, grades 3–8 will fold it into the information technology curriculum and grade 9 into school-based courses, while senior high will place it within the compulsory IT course, with a floor of 10 class hours per academic year.
Pedagogically the province is pushing task-based, project-based and problem-based learning, alongside a teaching-research mechanism described as "provincial coordination, city-county linkage, school-level implementation." Schools are encouraged to form AI clubs, run campus science festivals and organise study activities, while an AI education zone with domain-specific agents will be deployed on the Henan Smart Education Platform.
On applications, the opinion calls for AI to be embedded in personalised learning and interactive inquiry, with pilots of AI learning companions; subject-wide AI teaching assistants for human-machine co-planning; and intelligent marking, Q&A and tutoring. It also promotes AI-assisted item writing, test assembly and grading, and a data-enabled student competency evaluation system.
The guardrails are the most quotable part of the document. The opinion explicitly forbids turning smart technology into a tool for rote exam drilling, bars students from using AI to complete homework, and requires that deployments avoid adding to teachers’ workload or students’ academic burden — a notable stance as Chinese authorities grapple with AI’s classroom role.
Support measures include upgrading campus networks and smart teaching terminals, making AI education laboratories a priority within smart and digital campus programmes, and opening university, research institute and enterprise AI labs to school students. AI will become mandatory content in teacher training at all levels, with a multi-department coordination mechanism, an expert pool, an enterprise resource pool and a full-chain security framework covering data, content, technology, algorithms and models.
The provincial targets sit under a national framework: in April 2026 five central departments, including the Ministry of Education, issued the "AI Plus Education" Action Plan, which calls for deep AI-education integration by 2030 and a full-chain AI literacy system across all school stages.
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