By She Yu, Research Department of Social Development, DRC& Li Kejian and Lu Hao, Luo Yuanyuan, Zhejiang Normal University

Research Report, No.290, 2021 (Total 6355) 2021-9-29

Abstract: The evaluation of the quality of pre-school education is a process in which relevant entities make evaluations on services provided by pre-school education institutions on meeting the needs of children in learning and self-development as well as social demands. At present, the quality evaluation of preschool education in China still have some problems to be resolved. For instance, the effectiveness of preschool education standards and the grading evaluation of local kindergartens need to be improved; the third-party social organizations are incompetent in self-improvement, and the scientific and professional research and development on evaluation tools and supervision mechanisms are inadequate. Moreover, the internal evaluation of preschool education institutions is still in the initial phase with problems of vague functions, general index systems, and weak effectiveness remaining to be addressed urgently. In view of these issues, the authorities need to introduce national-level guidelines on evaluation of the quality of kindergarten education, promote local governments to revise and improve the evaluation system and refine the third-party evaluation and supervision mechanisms through introducing professional organizations. In addition, efforts need to be made to enhance the level of internal evaluation of kindergartens through external evaluations for sustainable improvement of education quality.

Keywords: pre-school education, quality evaluation, system, problems, policy options