Behind before they Begin: The Challenge of Early Childhood Education in Rural China

THE MAIN GOAL OF THIS paper is to analyse factors (accessibility, attendance rates and quality of preschools) that may be affecting the educational readiness of China's rural children before they enter the formal school system. Using data from a survey of 82 preschools and 492 households in six counties in three provinces of China, this paper documents the nature of early childhood education (ECE) services and the educational readiness of children aged four to five years in rural China. We present evidence that ECE services are seriously deficient. We show that China's rural children score much lower on standardised tests of educational readiness than their urban counterparts and that more than one half of the rural children in our sample are ‘not ready’ to continue on to the next level of formal education, possibly owing to the poor quality of early childhood education and low participation rates in early childhood education.