East from the centre of Lhasa, driving across Najin Bridge and getting on about fifteen minutes, one can see a new town under construction. This is Lhasa Education Town, which took its construction in 2012. Now it is the biggest modern education centre and education base in Tibet.

In 2012, Lhasa unprecedentedly wrote education into its No. One file of the year. For the first time in history, Lhasa attached great importance to education, made investment and sped up the construction for education. With the concentration of schools as the key point, a new round of comprehensive education reform was under its way. The construction of Lhasa Education Town is an important project aiming to improving school operating efficiency, balancing the development of education in urban and rural areas and upgrading the teaching quality.

According to the blueprint, the first phase of Lhasa Education Town covers an area of 4284 mu and 17 stations projects with a total investment of nearly RMB3.7 billion. It will become a multi-functional modern education town integrated with a concentration of preschool education, compulsory education, high school education, vocational education, university and scientific research institutes, special education, faculty training and the relevant supporting facilities, such as residence, healthcare, municipal administration, business, etc. In the centre of Lhasa Education Town will remain a very distinctive natural Tibetan village and the population of the town will reach 50,000.

While providing sustainable intellectual support and personnel security for the development of Tibet, Lhasa Education Town simultaneously carries out the strategic plan of urban development towards the east and west of Lhasa, so as to optimize city layout and industrial structure and improve urban environment as well.

Walking through Lhasa Education Town, visitors can see the picture of a modern education base in highland area has gradually turned out to be wide and tidy asphalt roads and beautiful buildings, hospitals and dormitories in real world.

There are a variety of educational institutions and facilities, including kindergarten covering more than 30 mu with a construction investment over RMB40 million, Beijing aided Beijing Demonstration School and Jiangsu aided Jiangsu Demonstration School, spreading over 200 mu with an investment of RMB200 million respectively, Vocational and Technical School, Special Education School, Party School, Teacher Re-education School, Socialism College, Scientific Research Base of Tibet University, the Second Naqu High School, Ali High School, Dongcheng People’s Hospital, the Gardener Garden, the Youth Base, etc. The appearance of already built dormitories integrates traditional Tibetan elements into modern construction technique, demonstrating a perfect combination of tradition and modernity.

Over 2 years’ construction, the majority of most educational institutions and supporting projects in Lhasa Education Town have been basically completed and are under interior decoration now. It is known that the four schools, Lhasa First Secondary Vocational and Technical School, Beijing Demonstration School, Jiangsu Demonstration School and Lhasa Special Education School, would be the first ones coming into service in September and there would be tens of thousands of students gathering here to start their new semesters.

Superior hardware facilities are the foundation while excellent educational resource as the guarantee. Beijing Demonstration School and Jiangsu Demonstration School, which will open in September this year, will introduce hundreds of teachers from Beijing and Jiangsu to Tibet working together with local outstanding teachers. The advanced school operation system and Tibetan-Mandarin bilingual teaching mode will deeply take root in Lhasa and promote the development of overall education level. It is reported that the first 200 teachers from Beijing and Jiangsu would arrive in Lhasa in May.

In addition, the educational resources will be further adjusted and rationally allocated with the implementation of school layout adjustment in Lhasa. The problems of “schooling difficulty” and children need to be picked up by parents, especially for those from nomadic family in remote areas, will be solved and transformed into “receiving good education” and government escort.

Qi Zhala, the municipal party secretary of Lhasa, clearly expressed his consideration on education development in Lhasa: take moderate concentration of school operation as the majority, develop a mode of “villages running kindergarten, towns elementary school, counties junior high school and cities senior high school”, further improve the rational layout of schools at all level to optimize educational resource and accelerate the balanced development of education in urban and rural areas.

“Tibet needs to be developed based on the development of education. We will spend 5 years building the education in Lhasa better than that on other ethnic regions in the west part of China,” Qi Zhala said, “the key issue for the next 3 years will be to improve the quality of education to reach the standard of adding another 100 points to the total score of college entrance examinations in 3 years. We are determined to succeed in the battle of education reform.”