Ren Dabing instructs students at Molao Youyi Primary School in Biancheng Town of Huayuan County, central China’s Hunan Province, Sept. 9, 2025. (Photo: Xinhua)
China’s Ministry of Education (MOE) has released measures to further reduce the non-teaching workload on primary and secondary school teachers, media reported on Monday. The measures address major sources of non-teaching pressure through a series of targeted and operable approaches, such as setting boundaries to prohibit forcing teachers and students to participate in activities unrelated to education, to curb excessive administrative interference.
The notice outlines eight key measures: tightening standards for document issuance and review, managing supervision checklists, optimizing the "whitelist" system for social affairs entering campuses, tightly controlling the secondment of teachers, streamlining data reporting, improving after-school service safeguards, refining monitoring and verification mechanisms, and strengthening inter-departmental coordination. These steps aim to institutionalize and standardize teacher workload reduction nationwide, China Central Television reported on Monday.
Specifically, the MOE will introduce a consistency-review mechanism for document issuance, with a key criterion being whether assigned tasks exceed teachers’ core duties.
The MOE will also review provincial whitelists for social affairs entering campuses, completing lists before the spring semester each year. Provincial records are generally capped at 10 items, which will be publicly disclosed. Items not on the whitelist are prohibited on campus, and each school may host no more than six such activities per semester, the notice said.
Higher-level authorities are, in principle, prohibited from seconding primary and secondary school teachers. When genuinely necessary, secondment duration is generally no more than 6 months, the MOE stipulated.
During statutory holidays, weekends, and school vacations, teachers should not be assigned on-campus duties, the notice said.
After-school services must be held on school days, with ending times in line with local off-work hours. Arbitrary expansion of scope is prohibited. Schools can adopt flexible work schedules for teachers, and after-school service participation must not be rigidly linked to teacher title evaluations, excellence awards, or similar incentives.
Industry experts and several teachers told the Global Times on Monday that the heavy non-educational teaching workloads are widespread nationwide, seriously affecting teachers’ core teaching duties.
"Non-educational affairs mainly involve assignments from various administrative authorities unrelated to education," said Chu Zhaohui, a research fellow at the National Institute of Education Sciences. "These include inspections, evaluations, form-filling, meetings, etc. Past surveys have shown schools receive over 1,000 documents a year from both education and non-education departments," Chu noted, "Some teachers have told me that while they genuinely want to focus on teaching, only about one-third of their time is spent on actual teaching - the rest is consumed by paperwork."
A Beijing middle-school teacher, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told the Global Times that class advisors are asked to inspect dorms at night, cutting their rest time; they were also required to even supervise meals in the cafeteria, monitor cleaning duties after school.
"We formulated the measures after reviewing past practices across regions and an in-depth analysis of current challenges and bottlenecks," an official from the MOE’s Teacher Work Department of the Ministry of Education told reporters on Monday.
"We have introduced a series of innovative steps to effectively minimize unnecessary interference, so that teachers can concentrate on teaching," the official said. "Our goal is to ensure that their time and energy are truly devoted to the core mission of fostering moral integrity and nurturing talent."
The measures focus on three main priorities, the official said. First strictly control external interference, by filtering out unrelated tasks at the source and provide clear regulations for teacher-related burdens that have long perplexed frontline teachers. Second, optimize internal governance, by focusing within the education system itself, leveraging technology and standardized processes to relieve teachers’ burdens. Third, strengthen supervision and accountability, consolidate primary responsibilities, and improve monitoring and verification mechanisms.
"The notice reflects the seriousness of the problem and the urgent need to address it. Meanwhile, we must recognize that it cannot be resolved overnight - it involves long-standing issues, including deep-rooted systemic challenges in management. Fundamentally, valuing education does not mean piling more burdens on schools. It means elevating schools’ professional quality and better meeting students’ developmental needs," Chu said. The expert urged that whether these measures can be effectively implemented should be the key focus of follow-up oversight.
Several regions, including Beijing, Shenzhen and Foshan in Guangdong Province, and Sichuan Province, have already introduced similar policies to ease teachers’ non-core workloads, according to media reports.
原文地址：http://en.people.cn/n3/2025/1111/c90000-20388878.html