Hailing from the remote mountains of Hainan to the world arena, Qiongzhong women's football team has become a "golden business card" of Hainan. The football players have benefited a lot from the integration of sports with education. Qiongzhong County adopts the "center plus school" mode, through which students selected by the  Qiongzhong Women’s Football Management Center are allowed to attend classes at three schools in the county with high education quality. The county has set up 10 football classes with a special schedule to match the training time.

 

“The students can learn the significance of study through practice. We have combined the knowledge of math, geometry, music and drawing into our everyday football training. This kind of education is much more profound than that in books. Therefore, I think the integration of sports with education is beneficial to and plays an important role in the healthy and positive development of students,” said Xiao Shan, head coach of Hainan Qiongzhong Women's Football Team.

 

In order to build the Hainan Free Trade Port with Chinese characteristics and global influence, Hainan has been committed to deepening education reform and opening-up, building itself into a pacesetting island for international-oriented education and  promoting overseas high-level universities and vocational colleges to set up science, engineering, agriculture and medical branches in the province. Since 2018, more than 130 education cooperation projects have been signed, with a total investment of more than 40 billion yuan, including the introduction of 45 prominent universities at home and abroad, as well as 83 well-known primary and secondary schools and kindergartens.

 

Chen Gang, president of the Hainan Shengfeng Education Group, said, “We will do our best to complete the project on time with high quality, and help to speed up the establishment of the Haikou Jiangdong New Area Kindergarten, which will be a high-end international education choice for Hainan people.”

 

In March this year, Hainan issued an institutional innovation plan to transform itself into a pacesetting island for international-oriented education. The document focuses on the institutional innovations in six major aspects, including educational autonomy and the return of overseas education consumption. Key industrial parks such as the Lingshui Li'an International Education Innovation Pilot Zone and the Yazhou Bay Science and Technology City explore and implement a sharing mode of running schools, attach importance to the training of international talents, and aim to create a first-class international education system featuring multi-cultural integration, multi-disciplinary integration, and mutual learning between China and the West.

 

In 2021, Hainan’s project of introducing at least two high-quality schools and one kindergarten to each of its cities and counties to boost basic education has been completed. Over the years, the province has introduced 83 high-quality schools including the Sanya School Affiliated to the Renmin University of China, the Haikou School Affiliated to Beijing Normal University and the Wenchang School Affiliated to Tsinghua University, achieving full coverage of its cities and counties, enabling more than 160,000 children to accept high-quality education and driving the development of its compulsory education.