In 2009, Guangdong Province witnessed a 99.88% enrollment rate for school-age children, a 100% retention rate of the fifth-year primary school pupils, and a 100% gross enrolment rate for junior middle school students. The enrollment rate of junior middle school graduates and the gross enrollment rate of children to receive three-year pre-school education before primary education were 89% and 77.3% respectively, which is 6 and 5 percentage point higher respectively than that in the last year. Starting from the spring semester of the same year, there was the cancellation of temporary schooling fees for students during the compulsory education period. In the autumn of the same year, the problem of compulsory education for the children of 2,786,900 non-registered permanent residents was resolved. Throughout the province, senior middle schools enrolled 1,515,000 students, an increase of 19.4% than that in the last year, among which, secondary vocational schools enrolled 797,000 students, with the total enrollment ranking first nationwide. The number of high school students was 3,779,000, an increase of 12.69% than that in the last year. The ratio of general education to vocational education for students at school is 51:49. The gross enrollment rate for senior high school students reached 79.9%, a 7.9 percentage point than that in the last year.
The whole year witnessed the smooth development of a modern vocational education system, the stable advancement of a vocational education group and the innovation of educational mechanism and of the mode of nurturing talents. Altogether in the whole province, there were 178 secondary vocational schools which practiced both the combination of work and study, and the training mode of post practice. The talent nurturing mode of “zero tuition fee education and zero distance employment” in Shunde, Guangdong Province, constituted a banner in terms of vocational education reform in China. The whole province boasts a total of 131 universities, with an enrollment of 438,600 undergraduate students and students of junior college level each year with 1,334,100 students at school. For full-time postgraduate education, there was an enrollment of 24,500 students, an increase of 15.77% than that in the last year, and a number of 65,900 students at school, an increase of 12.01% than that in the last year. The gross enrollment rate for higher education was 27.5%, an increase of 0.5 percentage point than that in the last year.
The universities throughout the province altogether conceived 9 projects for “The 973 Program” chief scientists, with the number of annually approved and initiated projects and the total number of approved and initiated projects ranking third nationwide. 4 persons from the universities were selected as academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering, with the total number reaching 26 in the whole province. There was an addition of 14 vacancies for Pearl River Scholar Funded Scheme and 16 people became newly-appointed “Pearl River Scholars”. So now, 35 became “Pearl River Scholars”, 11 became “Changjiang Scholars” of the Ministry of Education with a total of 58 “Changjiang Scholars”, and 4 was selected as members of “The One-Thousand-Talents Scheme”.