Beijing Unveils 2026–2030 Education Plan, Targeting a Global AI-in-Education Hub
On 24 September the Beijing Municipal Education Commission issued the Beijing 15th Five-Year Plan for Education Reform and Development, mapping out the capital’s education agenda for 2026–2030. The plan targets having the capital essentially established as the leading city of a strong education nation by 2030, and being the first to achieve a high level of education modernisation; by 2035 it aims to be a globally influential advanced education city.
The document is organised around 12 priority areas and 38 task measures, covering ideological and political education, integration of education with science and talent, coordinated development across the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, basic education equity, higher education, vocational education, lifelong learning, AI in education, the teaching workforce, systemic reform, international exchange and campus safety.
On basic education, Beijing will build an integrated childcare and kindergarten service system, improve support policies for inclusive private kindergartens and encourage greater social provision of childcare. It plans a "Jingxiaobao" (京小宝) agent offering services to families with infants and toddlers, and will steadily expand the scope of free education while exploring an extension of the length of compulsory education and adding capacity at high-quality academic high schools.
The plan also commits to consolidating the outcomes of the "double reduction" burden-reduction campaign, building a curriculum system in which difficulty and pressure are matched to age and stage, and upgrading compulsory education in the plain new towns and ecological conservation areas, encouraging schools from the core and central districts to open high-level high schools there. All rural schools are to be brought into education groups.
For higher education, Beijing will optimise the balance across diploma, undergraduate, master’s and doctoral training, support expansion at quality undergraduate programmes, and raise the scale and quality of graduate education. It also encourages new organisational forms such as residential college systems and modern industry colleges.
The lifelong-learning section calls for high-quality elderly education, including the establishment of a Beijing Senior University, branded programmes such as "Jinghua Chuanxin," "Xueyang Jingcheng" and "Zhixiang Yinling," exploration of a "silver-age learning record" certification system, and greater participation by social providers.
On artificial intelligence, the plan sets out to build a world-leading "AI plus education" highland. It calls for deepening AI general-education courses across primary, secondary and tertiary levels, exploring the inclusion of AI in the university public foundational course system, supporting future learning centres and self-directed laboratories, and reshaping traditional degree programmes to produce interdisciplinary AI talent.
The approach to deployment is summarised as "embrace proactively, act by age group, advance cautiously," backed by a full-process regulatory mechanism and ethics framework for AI in education. Beijing will rely on the national pilot base for AI application in basic education to deepen pilots, cultivate a "Jingwa" (京娃) family of agents, build a capital education map, promote an "AI application supermarket" and innovation community, and develop a batch of AI benchmark schools exploring new forms of future schooling.
Teacher policy will shift the teacher-education paradigm, supporting cross-training between science and engineering programmes at comprehensive universities and teacher-education institutions, strengthening AI literacy, and enabling teachers to work across disciplines and school stages.
The document is organised around 12 priority areas and 38 task measures, covering ideological and political education, integration of education with science and talent, coordinated development across the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, basic education equity, higher education, vocational education, lifelong learning, AI in education, the teaching workforce, systemic reform, international exchange and campus safety.
On basic education, Beijing will build an integrated childcare and kindergarten service system, improve support policies for inclusive private kindergartens and encourage greater social provision of childcare. It plans a "Jingxiaobao" (京小宝) agent offering services to families with infants and toddlers, and will steadily expand the scope of free education while exploring an extension of the length of compulsory education and adding capacity at high-quality academic high schools.
The plan also commits to consolidating the outcomes of the "double reduction" burden-reduction campaign, building a curriculum system in which difficulty and pressure are matched to age and stage, and upgrading compulsory education in the plain new towns and ecological conservation areas, encouraging schools from the core and central districts to open high-level high schools there. All rural schools are to be brought into education groups.
For higher education, Beijing will optimise the balance across diploma, undergraduate, master’s and doctoral training, support expansion at quality undergraduate programmes, and raise the scale and quality of graduate education. It also encourages new organisational forms such as residential college systems and modern industry colleges.
The lifelong-learning section calls for high-quality elderly education, including the establishment of a Beijing Senior University, branded programmes such as "Jinghua Chuanxin," "Xueyang Jingcheng" and "Zhixiang Yinling," exploration of a "silver-age learning record" certification system, and greater participation by social providers.
On artificial intelligence, the plan sets out to build a world-leading "AI plus education" highland. It calls for deepening AI general-education courses across primary, secondary and tertiary levels, exploring the inclusion of AI in the university public foundational course system, supporting future learning centres and self-directed laboratories, and reshaping traditional degree programmes to produce interdisciplinary AI talent.
The approach to deployment is summarised as "embrace proactively, act by age group, advance cautiously," backed by a full-process regulatory mechanism and ethics framework for AI in education. Beijing will rely on the national pilot base for AI application in basic education to deepen pilots, cultivate a "Jingwa" (京娃) family of agents, build a capital education map, promote an "AI application supermarket" and innovation community, and develop a batch of AI benchmark schools exploring new forms of future schooling.
Teacher policy will shift the teacher-education paradigm, supporting cross-training between science and engineering programmes at comprehensive universities and teacher-education institutions, strengthening AI literacy, and enabling teachers to work across disciplines and school stages.
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