Teach For China

TFC attracts, trains and places young people with a passion for education to areas lacking educational resources, helping to provide quality schooling where it is most needed with the aim of closing China’s educational gap. Our model has been successfully adopted across 44 countries, demonstrating scale and the robust solution.

Our vision is that one day, all children in China will enjoy access to quality education. Our solution is to recruit, train and place exceptional young adults to work as elementary and middle schools teachers in rural, low-income schools.  Our solution can be divided into attracting & recruiting; training & placing; support & teacher development; systemic impact. 

We seek to attract the most promising young leaders from top universities in China and abroad and applicants undergo a rigorous selection assessing their competency in leadership, resilience, teamwork and commitment to our vision. 

Training kicks-off with an intensive five week, Summer Institute and continues over the course of the two years; preparing fellows to be effective teachers, strong cross-cultural communicators and meaningful, long-term contributors to their placement communities. In cooperation with local educators, we place fellows in under-resourced, low-income communities, where they work as full-time teachers leading lessons for approx. 150 students per academic year. 

Our solution doesn't end at the school gates. Our teachers also work with the local community, parents and local teachers to design and deliver local projects to address local issues. Fellows time in the classroom represent only the beginning of our solution and their potential to have a profound impact on addressing education inequity. In the long term, we are developing a network of leaders working across a variety of sectors to end educational inequality in China.

We believe that TFC’s solution presents an educational concept that improves quality of learning for young people in the 21st century and ensures equal access and inclusion of all children to quality education China, at the same time as making systemic, policy change. 

We are part of a global network - Teach For All - which has scaled our solution and model. 

In China’s major cities, nearly 80% of high school graduates go on to attend university. In impoverished rural areas, this figure drops to just 5%. A student’s place of birth is the biggest deciding factor in determining their educational prospects and future career path. The imbalance of educational resources in China is a complex issue with wide-reaching implications for the country’s social and economic development. Attempts to attract high-quality educators to underdeveloped regions have long stagnated, and few have been willing to tackle this issue on a long-term basis. 

Since 2008, TFC has provided more than 1,000 teachers for 220 primary and secondary schools resulting in a total of 1,140,000 lessons to more than 330,000 students.

During the 2015/2016 academic year, more than 67% of TFC classes were ranked among the top three in their grade. In addition, 90.4% of fellows carried out independent programs, helping to bolster education for students.

For the academic year of 2016/2017, across all classrooms students achieved an average of 13% improvement in their exam scores over the course of the year. 

By addressing educational inequity, we want to lessen the impact of children’s socioeconomic background and enable them to reach their potential and get the education they deserve in order to make the future brighter.

The primary beneficiaries of our solution are Chinese children in primary and secondary schools in rural China where our Fellows teach. In addition, our work also has an impact on the local communities where our Fellows engage with the students’ families in order to get a better understanding of the challenges faced by the locals. 

TFC have an advanced tracking system of the academic performance where the students are test at the beginning and by the end of the academic year. - Academic Achievements:

Including examination marks like passing rate and excellence rate.

Our program managers will keep track of the extra-curricular activities initiated by our Fellows and evaluate the number of students and local community members impacted. - Extra-curricular Activities:

Number of extra-curricular activities launched by the Fellows. The objective with the extra-curricular activities is to make the students and the local community thrive.

Going forward, we aim to recruit 1,000 fellows per academic year. - Expansion of cohort of Fellows:

We wish to increase the number of fellows recruited.

TFC is the leading education non-profit in China; achieving scale, depth and sustainable impact. We are the role model for what is possible for rural education in China. In Sept 2016 we launched our inaugural Meili elementary school - run entirely by TFC alumni, this decommission school was handed to us by local government - making it the first charter school in China - a historic and policy breakthrough; we piloted a new placement and support mechanism based on the Khan Lab School which is seeing impressive results; we are exploring how personalised learning can be introduced to our classrooms. 

Our IT-team has designed a management platform and cloud based platform built in to a Fellow Portal. Designed to aid our Fellows share information related to teaching methods and project management, the evolution in to a cloud-based platform which will be able to share lessons live for internal, and in future external, audiences to learn, critique and share will accelerate ours, and our felllows, learning.

Utilising cloud based software, designed and developed internally, our team have developed a platform which enables all of our teachers to live record their lessons, while automatically editing and uploading content to Program Managers (and the TFC community more broadly) to increase the breadth, depth and speed of feedback given to our Fellows.  We are also designing an automatic recommendation mechanism for online training content (which will soon amount to more than 600 hours of proprietary material!). The technology enables timely feedback & ability to share our top practitioners across our internal and external networks.

90% of our income each year is fundraised via corporate partnerships, foundations, individuals and galas. We receive a small proportion of money from the local education bureau who provide some funding towards our teachers stipends. We have seen a rapid growth in the number of institutional supporters in China for the past few years. With the ongoing support from our donors, the TFC solution ensures that we continuously have a positive impact on the students and the local communities in rural China. Our plan is to continue working with our current donors and also to bring new partners on board. 

The biggest limiting factors on delivering our solution are:

1. Sourcing and selecting candidates with the talent needed to join our programme. The bar is high and teaching in rural communities is not an appealing option to the students we seek to attract

2. Fundraising - with increased budget we urgently need to diversify our income 

3. Attracting high quality, competent staff to join our team

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/meet-teach-chinas-youngest-donor-shuang-zhao

We know that we have a solution to an unacceptable societal problem. If China is to transform from a manufacturing to service led economy, empowering students through education will be critical. We want to continue to learn some of the leading global pedagogy & contextualise it to our context; lead policy change in China; and conduct high-quality research in to the challenges facing students in rural communities - we cannot do this alone. We need experienced mentors to guide our team and access to global insights to push our work forward to the next level.  

Some of TFC's partners include: Li Ka Shing Foundation, Focus Media, Credit Suisse, Barclays, CFETS ICAP, China Securities, The Veh Family Philanthropy, Ciic, Bertelsmann, Anxin Trust & Investment Co. Ltd., ACC, Ernst & Young, Chow Tai Fook, Tiajin Airlens, Kingdee, Vanke Foundation, Ctrip, Parkland. 

Teach Future China and China Serve are TFC's main competitors .