




































BECE, Vol.11, No.2, 2022 1473 

 

 

 

 

How to Retain Rural Preschool Teachers? 
 

Yuhua Luo, Suojun Yuan, Longjun Zhou 

Jiangsu Second Normal University, Nanjing 211200, Jiangsu, China 

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” 

–William Butler Yeats 

S a result of the accelerated urbanization and the improved remu-

nerations of urban teachers, a large number of rural teachers have 

been pursuing employment in urban areas, resulting in a severe 

shortage of rural teaching staff. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced 

in developing countries. Disadvantages in rural school working and living 

situations such as low pay, poor living conditions, heavy workloads, limited 

professional development has made teacher recruitment and retention ex-

tremely challenging tasks. The unbalanced urban-rural distribution of teach-

ers, especially high-quality teachers, have become barriers to rural education 

development and further exacerbated the disadvantaged situations of rural 

students. 

Due to the exclusion of preschool education from China’s compulsory 

education and a lack of professional identity among rural preschool teachers 

(Yu & Liang, 2008), the turnover rate of rural kindergarten teachers has been 

worse than that of rural primary and secondary educators. In order to allevi-

ate the economic burden of farmers, rural kindergartens typically charge low 

fees. They are mainly funded by donations of various sources or by its 

founder(s). On the one hand, due to the high kid-teacher ratios, a rural kin-

dergarten teacher often has multiple roles to play, including the head of the 

kindergarten, teacher, child-care worker, and even cook. Their workloads are 

 

 

 

 

 
 

© 2022 Insights Publisher. All rights reserved. 

Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the 

terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License 

(http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction 

and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the In-

sights Publisher. 

A 

http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/


 

BECE, Vol.11, No.2, 2022 1474 

far more intense than those of their urban counterparts. On the other hand, 

the salary of a rural kindergarten teacher is even lower than the average in-

come of local farmers, and most of them are not entitled to medical insurance, 

endowment insurance and other welfare benefits. As a consequence, they 

have difficulty maintaining a decent life. Furthermore, few rural preschool 

teachers are accorded with the Bianzhi (a system of publicly funded posts in 

China) membership, which make them feel excluded from the current educa-

tion system.  

How to revitalize rural education and encourage high-competence ru-

ral teachers to devote themselves to education has become a global concern. 

Governments around the world have implemented a series of strategies to en-

sure supply of qualified teachers for rural educational institutions including 

rural kindergartens. For example, in 2013, China initiated the National 

Teacher Training Program which was open to kindergarten, primary and sec-

ondary school teachers all over the country. The program provides teachers 

with training in various aspects such as basic educational theory, teaching 

methodology and class management. In the following three years, about 

10,000 principals and teachers from rural kindergartens received this nation-

level training. More recently, China’s Ministry of Education introduced a 

professional ranking system for preschool education to evaluate teachers’ 

qualifications and ability and tie their salaries to their professional rankings 

(Wang et al., 2020). In Bangladesh, the government not only increased train-

ing expenditures for rural preschool education, but also encouraged rural 

teachers in pilot kindergartens to experiment new educational methods (Opel, 

2009). Such initiatives help improve rural preschool teachers’ working con-

ditions and increase retention rate of rural kindergarten teachers in develop-

ing countries. 

Boosting rural preschool teacher supply necessitates more pertinent 

research from academia. Factors Influencing the Turnover Intention of Rural 

Preschool Teachers in the Context of Rural Revitalization: An Analysis 

Based on a Moderated Mediation Model in this issue examined the status 

quo of preschool teacher turnover in China’s rural areas and identified the 

impact of work stress on rural preschool teachers’ turnover intention via the 

mediating effect of job apathy. The moderator role of Bianzhi membership 

was emphasized. This study recommended that a series of reforms should be 

carried out to restrict the workload of rural preschool teachers to a reasonable 

level, increase their salaries and compensation, create a teacher-friendly en-

vironment, and allocate adequate Bianzhi memberships to rural kindergartens 

with the aim of lowering the turnover rate and promoting the supply of rural 

preschool teachers (Wang et al., 2022). 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

BECE, Vol.11, No.2, 2022 1475 

References 

Fan, X. Z. (2015). Fundamental issues of rural education development. Journal of Central 

China Normal University (Humanities and Social Sciences), 2015(5):146-154. 

Opel, A., Ameer, S. S., & Aboud, F. E. (2009). The effect of preschool dialogic reading 

on vocabulary among rural Bangladeshi children. International Journal of Educa-

tional Research, 48(1):12-20. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2009.02.008  

Wang, L., Dang, R., Bai, Y., Zhang, S., Liu, B., Zheng, L., Yang, N., & Song, C. (2020). 

Teacher qualifications and development outcomes of preschool children in rural 

China. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 53:355-369. DOI: 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2020.05.015  

Wang, T., Li, M., Liu, S., & Zhang, X. (2022). Factors influencing the turnover intention 

of rural preschool teachers in the context of rural revitalization: An analysis based 

on a moderated mediation model. Best Evidence in Chinese Education, 11(2):1523-

1527. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.22.ab005  

Yu, D. Q., & Liang, H. M. (2008). Major issues of rural preschool staffing in China and 

countermeasures. Studies in Preschool Education, 2008(2):13-16. 

 

 

 

Correspondence to:  

Longjun Zhou, Ph.D. 

Jiangsu Second Normal University 

Nanjing 211200 
Jiangsu 

China 

E-mail: 294437034@qq.com 

 

About the Authors: 

Yuhua Luo 

E-mail: luoyuh@126.com 

& 
Suojun Yuan 

E-mail: lukesj64@126.com 

Jiangsu Second Normal University 
Nanjing 211200 

Jiangsu 
China. 

Conflict of Interests: None. 

Doi: 10.15354/bece.22.co012 

 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2009.02.008
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2020.05.015
https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.22.ab005
mailto:294437034@qq.com
mailto:luoyuh@126.com
mailto:lukesj64@126.com

