The "in place" approach may solve the problem of stay-at-home children

According to related data, this year, over 100 million migrant workers decided to celebrate the Spring Festival in their places of work in response to the government’s appeal for them to spend the holiday “in place”. For this group, the biggest concerns are the elderly and children back at home.

According to official data, by the end of August 2018, there were almost 7 million stay-at-home children in our country. This number is calculated on the basis of "parents who both go out to work, or one parent goes out to work, the other lacks the ability to provide guardianship to the children". However, if we use the data of one parent goes out to work, then the corresponding number of stay-at-home children is as high as 58 million.

It is well-known that the fundamental solution to the problem of stay-at-home children is to allow these children to live with their parents. Essentially, this means eliminating the phenomenon of stay-at-home children altogether. In my opinion, migrant workers who stayed “in place” during Spring Festival provided a valuable reference for solving the problem of stay-at-home children. That is, we can use the thinking of “stay in place” approach to guarantee children of migrant workers can attend schools where their parents work.

Before, our country solved the school enrollment problem of migrant children by allowing "non-local students to take high school and college entrance examinations” in their parents’ place of work. However, since this is defined as "non-local", this is in conflict with "local" students' enrollment benefits, which resulted in considerably high threshold for non-local students to actually take high school and college entrance examinations as “non-locals”. Many children of migrant workers have thus been denied access to such benefits, and some regions only lifted the restrictions on non-local students taking high school and secondary and higher vocational schools. Which means they simply can’t attend examinations for enrollment at regular four-year colleges in their parents’ place of work.

This directly resulted in a special group in stay-at-home children in our country--migrant children who return home. This group refers to children who had experiences living and attending school in cities with their parents, but had to return home due to various reasons. Among them, the inability to continue attending school in cities is the main reason. There are already researches showing that compared with other children, migrant children who return home have higher risks of falling into depression, are more prone to being bullied in school, and have higher academic stress.

The “in place” approach in solving the enrollment issue of migrant workers' children is entirely different from the "non-local" mentality. First, local governments will feel responsible to help these children to attend school locally, incorporate their schooling into local financial budget as further guarantee, and not shift the responsibility for the problem to the location where the children’s hukou (household registration) is located in. When central and provincial governments conduct transfer payments, they will also transfer them based on the number of children involved, and establish expenditure regulations that will shift with student status changes. At present, certain areas are not active in solving the problem of migrant children’s school enrollment, because they still put the importance of solving the problem of students' hukou first, and they also lack relevant safeguard mechanism in funding.

In driving forward reforms of high school and college entrance examinations, we should also use the “in place“ thinking to initiate the institutional reforms of examination and admission. Different from the registration system of high school and college entrance examinations which focus on students' hukou locations, the post-graduate entrance examination in our country is using the “in place" approach where students can register and take exams at the places where their hukou is located, where they work, or where they attend college. Graduate schools would then combine unified examination and interview scores to determine admissions. High school and college entrance examination reforms, especially college entrance examination reforms, can absolutely follow the example of the “in place" approach of registration, examination, and admission of graduate schools. If we implement a system based on a national unified examination as well as admissions based on comprehensive assessments by the school, then candidates can take the unified examination at any location. Colleges can also combine the scores of the unified examination, students' middle school scores, general performances, the region's educational development situation, and conduct autonomous admissions. This will be convenient for parents who take children with them while working in cities, and will not create a man-made phenomenon of stay-at-home children due to the inability to enroll in school or attend higher grades.

Our country’s education has realized the popularization of all forms of education at all levels. With the rapid progress of urbanization, reform of the hukou system is also accelerating. In the next 10 years, educational development and social welfare guarantees should focus on eliminating the phenomenon of stay-at-home children, to realize greater educational equality, and provide an environment that can facilitate children’s healthy growth on the school, family, and societal levels.

Contributed by Bing Qi, education researcher

Translated by Zhang Junye