6-Day China School Management: Beijing & Shanghai Schools

Afternoon - Arrival and welcome
You are met at Beijing Capital or Daxing airport (or at the railway station) with a name board by your programme leader and transferred to your hotel. Rooms are pre-registered so the group can settle straight in.

Late afternoon - Orientation briefing: how Chinese schooling is organised
A structured opening session, led by your programme leader and an invited education specialist. It sets the vocabulary the rest of the week depends on:

• Compulsory education. Schooling in China is compulsory for nine years, covering six years of primary and three of junior middle school; senior middle school is then either academic or vocational.
• Curriculum standards. Subject standards are set nationally, and textbooks are produced against them by approved publishers; schools and local authorities then adapt delivery, timetabling and assessment within that framework. Understanding where national authority ends and school autonomy begins is the single most useful thing to grasp before the school visits.
• Who runs a school. The principal holds the leadership responsibility for the school, supported by deputy principals, grade-level leaders and subject teaching-research groups. That middle layer is where most day-to-day management actually happens.

The school canteen rule - a worked example of regulation into practice
China's Regulation on Food Safety and Nutritional Health in Schools, issued jointly by the Ministry of Education, the State Administration for Market Regulation and the National Health Commission as Order No. 45 (published 20 February 2019, effective 1 April 2019), is a useful case study in how a single document reshapes daily school management:

• Article 12 places the principal formally in charge of food safety in the school - a named, personal responsibility rather than a committee's.
• Article 13 requires a dining-with-students system: at every meal a member of the school's leadership team eats with the students, and keeps a written record of it. Where conditions allow, schools are encouraged to invite parents to join.
• Each meal's dishes must be sampled and retained - at least 125 grams, refrigerated in a dedicated cabinet for a minimum of 48 hours - so that any problem can be traced back.
• Schools able to do so are encouraged to open their kitchens to view, in the policy phrase mingchu liangzao, "bright kitchen, transparent stove".

You will see all four of these at work when you eat in a school canteen on Day 2. They are worth reading carefully in advance, because they are the clearest example in Chinese school management of a national rule expressed as a daily routine.

Evening - Welcome dinner
Dinner at a family-run restaurant in a restored hutong courtyard house, with the programme explained day by day and time for the group to set its own questions for the schools. Before dinner, a short walk through the old lanes and along the edge of Tiananmen Square gives a first sense of the city's scale.

Meals
Dinner

Accommodation
4-star hotel in central Beijing, twin share, breakfast included.

Morning - The operating rhythm of a Beijing school
You arrive before the first bell. Your hosts walk the delegation through what it actually takes to run the day: how the master timetable is built and re-built each term within national guidance on periods per subject; how class sizes are set and how pupils are grouped; how duty rosters cover corridors, gates, the canteen and the playground; and who signs what, at what hour, on an ordinary school day. The campus walk is organised around those responsibilities rather than the other way round - teaching building, subject laboratories, library and reading rooms, the psychology and counselling room, arts and music rooms, sports hall and outdoor facilities, each with the staff member who owns it.

Late morning - Two lessons, seen as timetabled practice
We arrange two lessons in subjects of your choice, almost always one mathematics and one Chinese language lesson, with the class teacher's consent and no disruption to the lesson. The purpose is operational as much as pedagogical: how a period is actually used, what the teacher is required to record, how the lesson closes so that the next one can start on time. Look in particular at:

• Class size and seating, and whether pupils are grouped by attainment within the room.
• How the teacher questions the class, and how long pupils are given to answer.
• Board work and the use of the digital whiteboard; how much of the lesson is whole-class, group or individual work.
• How the lesson closes - what the pupils are asked to do next, and how the teacher checks that they have understood.

A short debrief with the teacher immediately afterwards is usually the most valuable part of the morning.

Lunch - In the school canteen
You eat with the students, and you can see the dining-with-students system working: a member of the school's leadership team eats in the hall and signs the daily record. Your hosts can show you the retained sample cabinet, the delivery inspection records and the kitchen viewing arrangements introduced under the 2019 regulation. This is a good place to ask operational questions - contract catering versus in-house provision, portion control, and how the school handles allergies and religious or cultural dietary requirements.

Afternoon - The subject teaching-research group
The jiaoyanzu, or teaching-research group, is the structure that carries professional practice inside a Chinese school, and it has no exact equivalent in most Western systems. Teachers of the same subject meet on a fixed weekly cycle to plan lessons together, observe one another, moderate marking and examinations against a common standard, and bring on newly qualified colleagues. In this session you sit with a working group, look at a real lesson plan and assessment paper, and discuss how the group's decisions bind (or do not bind) the individual teacher. It is the mechanism most often recommended for visitors to study closely.

Late afternoon - The Guozijian quarter
On the way back, a walk through the Confucius Temple and the Imperial College, or Guozijian, the state academy that trained officials for the imperial examinations for some six centuries. It is a fitting end to the first school day: the oldest institution of higher learning in the city, the newest classroom you have just observed, and the same argument about standards and assessment in between.

Evening - Dinner and debrief
Dinner with your programme leader, comparing notes from the day. Each delegate is encouraged to keep two running lists for the week: what transfers to our own school, and what does not.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
4-star hotel in central Beijing, twin share, breakfast included.

Morning - the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed line
The train leaves Beijing South and reaches Shanghai Hongqiao in roughly four and a half hours on the fastest services, over the 1,318-kilometre line that opened in 2011 and is the busiest high-speed railway in the world. It is worth paying attention to the journey itself: the route runs through the North China Plain, across the Yellow River and the Yangtze delta, and passes the kind of second- and third-tier cities that supply most of China's students. Tickets are bought against passport details and your guide handles collection and seat allocation.

Lunch
On board, from the trolley, or at the station before departure.

Afternoon - exchange with a Chinese-language teaching institution
A university school of international Chinese education, or a well-established private Mandarin teaching institution, hosts the afternoon. Expect a candid session on how short courses are actually built: how a four-week learner is placed, what is cut when time is short, how classes of mixed nationality and mixed script background are managed, how teachers are recruited and certified, and what the institution does about the learners who arrive expecting to speak fluently in a fortnight. There is usually a materials table - textbooks, graded readers, character workbooks - which participants find more useful than any lecture.

Evening - hotel and a free evening
Check in to the hotel after the afternoon session. The evening is deliberately left unscheduled at the end of a travel day: rest, or walk out from the hotel on your own. The programme's full Shanghai day follows tomorrow, and the city is taken in then.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Shanghai.

Morning - What a principal actually controls
A day built around the principal's real decision space rather than the organogram. Shanghai schools sit at one end of the Chinese spectrum for school-level autonomy, and the difference from Beijing is worth testing directly. The session works through where authority genuinely lies:

• Staffing. What the principal decides locally and what is set by the district: recruitment, teaching allocation, promotion recommendations, and how a weak performer is handled.
• Money. The school budget, which lines are ring-fenced, how discretionary spending is approved, and how a head teacher builds a case for investment in a building, a laboratory or a programme.
• Curriculum and the school day. Where national and municipal requirements stop and local design begins - elective provision, after-school programmes under the 2021 "double reduction" policy, and how a school differentiates itself.
• Parents and accountability. How parents raise concerns, how the school handles a serious complaint, what a district inspection examines, and which results the principal is genuinely judged on.

Classroom time is built into the morning so that these questions can be tested against real lessons rather than discussed in the abstract.

Lunch - In the school canteen
Again with the students, and again with the dining-with-students record on view. By now the delegation usually has specific questions about how a national food-safety regulation is audited in practice, and the school's staff can answer them directly.

Afternoon - Working roundtable
The centrepiece of the programme. The agenda is set by your delegation and sent to the school two to three weeks in advance, so that the Chinese leadership team arrives prepared. Topics that work well include teacher workload and non-teaching duties, class size and grouping, homework policy and the effect of the 2021 "double reduction" policy on after-school provision, assessment and examination pressure, parent expectations and communication, staff recruitment and retention, and how a school manages change when national policy shifts. Interpretation is provided by your programme leader, and each session is chaired so that both sides get equal time on each item.

Late afternoon - The former French Concession on foot
A walk in the plane-tree streets of the former French Concession, through Fuxing Park, where retired residents dance, play cards and practise calligraphy in the late afternoon, and on into the lanes around Tianzifang. It is a useful counterweight to the morning's systems talk: the school you visited sits inside a neighbourhood with its own social rhythms, and school leaders here work with those rhythms rather than apart from them.

Evening - Dinner and reflective session
Dinner, followed by a chaired reflective session: what each delegate would take back, and what they would leave. Notes from this session form the basis of the closing report on Day 6.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
4-star hotel in central Shanghai, twin share, breakfast included.

Morning - the campus, read as a manager
You are received by the principal and the leadership team and walked through the school. Read it the way a head reads another head's building: how many classes per year group and how many pupils in each; how classrooms are grouped and where specialist rooms sit; what the laboratories, maker spaces and library actually contain and how they are booked; how the canteen and the after-school service rooms are laid out; and how much of the campus is given to staff working space - a teaching-research room per subject is common, and its size tells you how much professional development happens on site.

Late morning - how a timetable is built
Sit with the academic affairs office while they explain a real timetable. This is where policy becomes arithmetic: national subject hours, the school-based curriculum allowance, after-school services, examination periods, the physical capacity of specialist rooms, and the constraint that no teacher can be in two places. Bring your own timetable problem and work it through with them; it is usually the most productive hour of the day.

Lunch
With the school leadership team.

Afternoon - roundtable on leadership, appraisal and data
The principal and the curriculum lead lead a discussion with your delegation. The ground to cover: how the school development plan is written, resourced and reviewed; how teachers are appraised and how the results feed promotion and pay; how the school uses Shanghai's green-indicator evaluation of student academic quality, which was introduced in 2011 and deliberately measures things beyond test scores, including learning motivation, workload and the school environment; how parents are brought in and how complaints are handled; and how teacher rotation between schools within a district is managed. Each participant then presents one school-improvement question of their own for the group.

Important
School visits depend on the host school's agreement, its calendar and the approval of the local education authority, and are confirmed in writing before the programme is finalised. Public schools are normally closed to visitors during vacations and examination weeks; if a visit cannot be approved, we substitute a district education exchange or an education research institute.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
In Shanghai.

Morning — final presentations
Each participant or team presents for ten minutes to a panel made up of the academic liaison, a faculty member and a postgraduate reviewer, followed by questions. The panel is asked to be direct, and it usually is: which claim is actually supported, which source was not read, which number is doing more work than it can bear. Notes are returned to each presenter in writing before departure. The point is not ranking - no marks are given - but the habit of defending a conclusion in front of people who are not being polite about it.

Late morning — closing session
A short closing session reviews what was covered, collects the participants' own written evaluation and hands out a certificate of attendance recording the dates, the host institutions' general description and the number of academic contact hours. It is worth being plain about status at this point: the programme is a study visit, not a matriculated course, and it is not credit-bearing unless a separate agreement has been made in advance between the participant's own institution and the host department. No grades, transcripts, references or research placements are offered, and the panel's comments are advisory rather than a mark. Attendance hours are recorded because some schools and universities require them for their own internal files, and the certificate states exactly what was done and where.

Lunch
A farewell lunch, and the last chance to exchange contacts through the liaison rather than by handing round personal details.

Afternoon — departure
Transfer to Pudong International Airport for long-haul departures, or to Hongqiao for domestic flights and high-speed rail. Your guide confirms the terminal, the check-in deadline and the rail platform in advance, and travels with the group to the departure point. Luggage can be stored at the hotel if the flight is late in the evening, and the group leaves with all project notebooks, the posters produced during the week and the written panel comments; anything supplied by a host laboratory stays with that laboratory unless permission has been given in writing. Allow three hours before a long-haul departure from Pudong and two before a domestic flight, since the check-in and security queues at both airports are long at most times of day.

Cultural Insight — what ten days can and cannot do
A visit of this length does not make anyone a researcher on China, and it is not meant to. What it can do is put a working laboratory, a departmental seminar, a canteen at noon and a graduate student with three years of a project behind them in front of you, and let you ask questions that a journal article will never answer. Participants who get the most out of it are the ones who arrive with a specific question about their own discipline, ask it of five different people during the week, and write down where the answers disagreed.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
Day ends on departure - no hotel night included.