Chinese City Qingyuan to Pilot 12-Year Through-Training From Fall 2027

Qingyuan, a prefecture-level city in Guangdong province, released the Qingyuan Student Healthy Growth Plan on September 28. Among its six stated priorities is a twelve-year through-training pilot beginning in autumn 2027: in designated areas, children entering Grade 1 will be able to progress from primary school through senior high school without being streamed by the high school entrance exam, in a bid to cut repetitive exam drilling.

The plan drew heavy attention on Chinese social media on September 29, with some readers interpreting it as a cancellation of the zhongkao. Officials and state media moved quickly to correct that reading. Per Guangzhou Daily, the pilot covers only the Grade 1 cohort entering in autumn 2027; students already enrolled are unaffected, the city’s zhongkao policy remains unchanged overall, and the national college entrance exam still applies.

School selection, enrolment rules and exit mechanisms have not yet been published. The city’s education bureau framed the plan around a "health first" principle and set stage-specific goals: play-based learning and habit formation in kindergarten; finding one genuine interest and building an optimistic disposition in primary school; and at secondary level, at least two hours of daily sport, mastery of one or two lifelong sports skills, and career-planning education.

Assessment reform is the second pillar. Physical fitness, myopia rates, mental health and personal interests are all to be folded into evaluation, with a "healthy growth record" tracking each student across all twelve years — an explicit move away from defining a child by a single exam score. The city will also pilot "sunshine class allocation" in compulsory education in autumn 2027: random class assignment with balanced teaching staff, no key or honours classes, and full public disclosure of both process and outcome.

The plan’s "six priorities and five bottom lines" reach well beyond exams: half a day of off-campus practical activity each week, phased in from lower grades up; local intangible heritage, ecology and industry content in lessons; two hours of daily sport with one PE lesson and 15-minute breaks; an end to confining children to classrooms during breaks; sports injury insurance; and strict sleep-time standards.

Qingyuan is not acting alone. Shanghai’s education commission issued a high school development plan on October 20, 2025 proposing long-cycle through-training pilots that support strong high schools extending downward and strong junior schools extending upward. The commission clarified through its official channel that the substance of long-cycle training is unified curriculum design and shared resources — not the removal of the zhongkao.

Chengdu began piloting twelve-year and six-year through-training classes from autumn 2025, stressing that the approach is not a reform of school length but a separate class track built on the nationally mandated structure, curriculum and textbooks. Zhejiang’s Shengsi county and Hunan’s Loudi have launched comparable pilots aimed at softening the exam’s selective function or exempting students from it directly.

Commentators have flagged recurring challenges across these pilots: building cross-stage teacher training, rotation and joint research mechanisms; keeping grading consistent once a single exam yardstick is weakened; and avoiding "formal linkage without real curriculum integration," where three stages of textbooks are simply stitched together. Qingyuan has tried to front-load fairness by pairing the pilot with randomised class allocation and by starting small rather than rolling out citywide.

For edtech and school operators, the direction of travel matters more than the pilot’s size. A twelve-year record built on fitness, mental health and interests rather than test scores alone points to growing demand for assessment, data and whole-child tooling — even as it shrinks the exam-preparation market that long underpinned China’s K12 tutoring sector.