New policies announced by the State Council to promote China's pre-school education is a good start in tackling the practical and specific problems in the country's pre-school education system, said a Chinese education expert on Thursday.

China will increase investment in pre-school education to ensure "basic" and "quality" pre-school education are more accessible to children, according to a statement released Wednesday after an executive meeting of the State Council, China's Cabinet, presided over by Premier Wen Jiabao.

The new policies reveal that the central government is making a point of pre-school education, said Xiong Bingqi, deputy director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, a Beijing-based private non-profit organization on educational policy research.

Soaring kindergarten fees and shrinking access have become top concerns for parents with pre-school children in big cities.

In Beijing, a city with a population of more than 17 million, the number of kindergartens has dropped from 3,056 in 1996 to the current 1,266, according to the Municipal Commission of Education.

In rural areas, a lack of awareness about pre-school education had left two-thirds of children not enrolled in kindergartens, according to a research by the Beijing Normal University's China Institute of Education Policy.

The entrance rate for Chinese children for a three-year pre-school education was 50.9 percent in 2009, the rate of a one-year pre-school education was 74 percent.

There were also problems such as understaffing and lack of professional careers, the research revealed.

To address these problems, the statement said spendings to promote pre-school education should be included in the budget of local governments, and the central government would provide more financial aid to the country's less-developed regions.

Also, the central government will train 10,000 kindergarten directors and teachers in three years, and all kindergarten teachers will be trained within five years, the statement said.

Xiong called on the government to move on to include pre-school education in the country's compulsory education system.

A major reason for the problems in pre-school education was that local governments did not attach enough importance to this issue, and statistics revealed that government spendings on pre-school education in China only made up one percent of total education spendings, Xiong said.

Including pre-school education in the compulsory education system would make local governments take more responsibilities to promote it, Xiong added.

However, such an undertaking would face some financial difficulties in the near future, said Zhang Li, director of the National Center for Education Development Research, which was affiliated with the Ministry of Education.

China has just made compulsory education free for the first nine-years, which starts from primary school and available for all students in urban and rural areas throughout the country, Zhang said.

Educational reforms and better pre-school education is important and imperative, but they can not be realized in one day, Zhang added.

Xiong also called on the government to hear more public opinion in drawing up the country's education plans.

China unveiled the Outline of the National Plan for Medium and Long-term Education Reform and Development (2010-2020) in July, pledging to popularize pre-school education around the country, after first publishing the draft to solicit public comments in February.

To get a closer insight into the situation of pre-school education, Premier Wen visited two kindergartens in Beijing on Tuesday, just one day before Wednesday's executive meeting.

By making policies in accordance with the people's demands, the government is taking active responses to public concerns, Xiong said.

(Xinhua News Agency November 5, 2010)