A population boom among Chinese teenagers will create challenges for crowded middle schools and must be addressed, the Ministry of Education said Thursday.

The number of students graduated from junior middle schools is expected to reach 20 million next year and rise by about 5 million per year through 2005, ministry statistics indicate.

To cope, senior middle school education must be expanded in the next few years, said Li Lianning, director of the ministry's Department for Basic Education.

Among the innovations suggested, universities are being encouraged to run senior middle schools in an effort to find spaces for the fast-expanding classes.

Private schools and those run by non-state organizations and companies are playing a significant supplementary role, Li said. Those entities have eased the shortage of middle school teachers, but they also only handle about one-tenth of the nation's middle school students.

Li promised the state would work out regulations to support and guide the development of non-governmental schools so that these schools can compete with state-run ones in today's fierce market.

Presently a stigma exists against those schools, with many questioning the reliability of their instruction.

Beijing, like other areas of China, will be affected by this trend. The city has pledged to build as many as 70 senior middle schools by 2005, each with at least 500 student spaces. Senior middle schools now open can handle an average of 205 students, according to the Beijing Education Committee.

Rural areas don't have the money to build like that, so the central government plans to help fund senior middle school construction in these areas.

No timetable or amounts have been given for this program, but the goal is to provide money for at least one new senior middle school in each county in the central and western areas, Li said.

(China Daily October 19, 2001)