China abandoned its one-child policy - now it must fix the gulf in education between city and country children

Li Bo’s job used to involve reporting unlawful pregnancies to family planning officials. Today, in the remote Wangyuan village in China’s mountainous Shaanxi province, he’s sat on a playmat helping a toddler build a fort with multi-coloured blocks.

Mr Li, 34, is employed by the once-despised Family Planning Commission: the enforcers of China’s single-child policy, which came to an end this year. Reports of apparent forced abortions, huge fines for families who have more than one child and snooping on people’s sex lives made the one-million strong workforce at best unpopular, and at worst terror-inducing.

“If I discovered a woman pregnant with a second child, I’d report her,” he says. “Then she would get the policy explained, and if she didn’t listen, punishment.”

The single-child policy has been scrapped, as China’s government aims to lower the average age of the country’s rapidly ageing workforce. Mr Li has been retrained and works as a child-nurturing trainer with the Rural Education Action Programme (Reap) – a pilot scheme that began in 2013 and aims to close the immense gap in educational achievement between rural and urban children.

Around 8 per cent of rural children in China take college entrance exams, compared with 70 per cent of urban children. Reap officials believe this is due to a woeful lack of mental stimulation for rural youngsters between birth and the age of three. They say this is the crucial period for neurons to connect in the brain and set a path for a child’s mental ability later in life. “Around 92 per cent of neurons will have completed connecting by the age of three,” says Professor Shi Yaojiang, who heads Reap at the Centre for Experimental Economics in Education at Xi'an city’s Shaanxi Normal University. “This period is critical for early development. If parents don’t nurture their child’s brains during this time, then mental ability cannot be maintained. If you miss it, it’s irreversible.”

In the early days of Reap, Professor Shi declared that rural families know more about raising pigs than children. “I was justified in saying this – we did tests about animal and child-raising knowledge and found that it was true,” he claims. “Traditionally, children in the countryside are beaten and scolded to make them obedient,” says Mr Li. “Even if young parents here know that’s wrong, it’s hard to make grandparents change their ways. Nobody has taught them before and some can’t even speak Mandarin, just dialects. I tell them that even if they can just read out the names of characters in a book to the child, that helps.”

To combat all this, Reap, which was set up in conjunction with Stanford University in California, has founded seven education centres in China’s centrally located Shaanxi province. Caregivers bring toddlers there for weekly play and learning sessions with trainers such as Mr Li, and can use the facilities all week.

The sessions are meticulously planned, offering age-appropriate toys and materials to stimulate motion, cognitive skills, language and social abilities. They are all designed to help ensure a child's crucial mental development. “We don’t have toys at home, and my granddaughter just used to rip up books,” says Chen Huafen, a grandmother who comes to the centre with her grandchild. My granddaughter’s parents work away in Xi'an, so I take care of her,” Ms Chen adds. “At first I told them I didn’t know how to nurture a child, so they said: ‘Go to the education centre.’ Everything is good here. At home my granddaughter would just play in the dirt.”

The four-room education centre is a burst of life and colour in the sparse village, the streets of which are deathly quiet due to most residents working away in fields, or as migrant workers. Dust swirls over the village's knobbly dirt roads as mangy dogs chew sheep skulls next to unmarked bus stops. Xi'an, Shaanxi province’s capital city, is a two-hour drive away through picturesque mountain terrain.

The centre is small and basic, filled with new toys and picture books. A ball pit and plastic slide make a colourful centrepiece, and the cartoon-adorned walls and floors are padded to help boisterous toddlers avoid accidents. The children who come to the centre are happy and calm, occupied by the wealth of playthings on offer, the tinny squawk of push-button electronic toys drowning out sporadic, short-lived tantrums. Most of the children have no such items at home.

He Danli, a 31-year-old full-time mother, sits reading a book to her son Yuheng, who is one and a half. “He has become more obedient since we started visiting here,” she says. “When you talk to him he shows more mental reaction than he used to. He always wants to come here.”

Reap has around 90 trainers who also make home visits to around 550 families living too far from the centres to travel to them. There are fewer than 20 centres at the moment, but there are plans to increase the number to 50 and pressure on the government to roll out the project nationwide.

Every six months Reap researchers compare mental ability test scores garnered from the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development between children who take part in the education course and those who don’t, and the results show the project is working. The group’s scores are maintained over time at an average of 97, and researchers have found that if children don’t take part in the course, their score declines to an average of 81. “And with a score of 81, you are not going to have the ability to graduate from high school,” claims Professor Shi.

Cai Jianhua, director of the training and communication centre at China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission, says the project can help children socially as well as educationally. “If a baby is born into a white-collar family, in which parents are likely to have good communication skills, they will have mastered around 1,100 words by the age of three,” he says. “If a baby is born into a family living just above the poverty line, they will have mastered around 500 words.

“If this problem goes unaddressed, these children will feel inferior by age five and it will have a life-long effect. There is a popular saying in China: ‘You can’t lose at the starting line.’ We want to give everyone the opportunity to at least stand at the starting line.”

Professor Shi has discussed the benefits of Reap with 27 National Health and Family Planning Commission officials from provinces across China in an attempt to see it spread throughout the country. Some have started setting up their own regional education centres. He hopes that the government will be enticed to fund a nationwide rollout by offering the prospect of a better-educated workforce: one more suited to China’s ongoing shift away from agriculture to urban industries.

In 2012, the country’s urban population surpassed its rural population for the first time, with more and more people moving from the countryside to cities to find employment. But despite this shift, 664 million people in a nation of 1.37 billion still lived in rural areas in 2014. “It used to be the case that a child only needed to be strong enough to plough the land with a cow,” says Professor Shi. “But we have entered a knowledge-based industrial society.”

Mr Li, meanwhile, is revelling in his new role, not having to spend his days doling out contraceptives and reporting unlawful pregnancies. “The effect this course has had on children is obvious,” he says, setting up a toy train track with a toddler and his granny. “I always come back to the memory of a little girl called Ruohan, who I did home visits with. Her parents were always arguing and you could see her lack of security – she never smiled and was shy in front of strangers. After doing these activities with the family, she just kept getting happier. And then, one day, she actually smiled.”