It is a long-term goal to further improve the general competence of teachers in addition to their working and living conditions, officials and legal experts said at a conference yesterday in Beijing marking National Teachers' Day and the 10th anniversary of the Teachers' Law.

Legal departments at all levels should make more efforts to help popularize the Teachers' Law among the public, in order to better protect the legal rights of educators, said Cao Kangtai, director of the Legislative Affairs Office under the State Council.

The Ministry of Finance will increase funding to educational development to help improve the conditions of schools and the living standards of teachers. The ministry is also aiming to support various training programs designed for primary, middle school and college teachers, said Vice-Minister Lou Jiwei.

Li Shenglin, vice-minister of the National Development and Reform Commission, said his commission will continue to make education a priority on its agenda. The commission encourages non-governmental sectors to run private schools to supplement government-run ones, he said.

State Councilor Chen Zhili said the system for evaluating the qualifications of teachers, which was officially implemented across the country in January 2001, will be used nationwide to ensure teaching teams are of high standard.

Statistics from the Ministry of Education indicate that 97 percent of teachers in primary schools, 90 percent of those in junior middle schools, 73 percent in senior middle schools and 95 percent in colleges are qualified under ministry-set standards. The rest are not qualified due to their relatively poor educational background.

According to the ministry's Information Department, the brain drain of qualified teachers in schools nationwide has been greatly reduced over the past decade, thanks to the improvement of the living and working conditions for educators.

In the 1980s, many teachers, especially those in colleges, quit their jobs to go abroad or took up careers in business to earn more money, as teachers' salaries were relatively lower on average.

Chinese teachers were degraded to a low social status during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) period. Thus, raising the status of teachers has been advocated by the central government since 1977.

(China Daily September 11, 2003)