Of Nutrition Improvement Pilot Plan For Compulsory Education Students In Rural Areas

Adequate nutrition is one of the most basic guarantees for students' physical growth and study.Nevertheless,because of the historical reasons and the lag of economic situation,the malnutrition of students in rural areas in Central and Western China has become a prominent problem,which seriously affects the healthy growth of students in rural areas and the urban-rural educational equity.National Medium-and Long-Term Education Reform and Development Plan Outline(2010-2020)states clearly that the government will advocate a reasonable diet,improve nutritional status,and improve the nutrition level of rural students in poor areas.In order to carry out the Outline,accelerate rural education development,improve education equality,and implement the education policy of the all-round development of moral qualities,intellectual ability,physical fitness,and aesthetic appreciation,the General Office of the State Council has carried out Students' Nutrition Improvement Plan in Compulsory Education in Rural Areas since 2011(Nutrition Improvement Plan for short).The plan involves 30 million middle and primary school students in 699 counties of concentrated and particular poverty-stricken areas in China.The research mainly discussed the major issues existed during the implementation of the Nutrition Improvement Plan,and solutions were put forward to solve those issues,which made strongpractical significance to promote the policy implementation of the Plan.In 2012,Liu Yandong,the vice premier of the State Council,made important instructions,“the full-scale operation of the Nutrition Improvement Plan in western province like Guizhou,fully embodies that the government attaches great importance to this problem,and this should be extended.I'm a member of ethnic minority from Guizhou province,engaged in the Program of Training of High-Caliber Backbone Personnel from Ethnic Minorities,making contribution to minorities education of my hometown is the way to show my love of it.Guizhou is a pilot province to implement Students' Nutrition Improvement Plan.I selected 58 middle and primary schools in Guizhou rural areas like Majiang,Taijiang,Danzhai,Zhenfeng,Zhijin,Ziyun,Qianxi,Weining,Dejiang,Shibing,Huishui,Tongzi,Libo as samples to survey.The author carried out investigations through literature review,questionnaire method,comparison method,and statistics.Based on the sorting out of the relevant literatures,and the preliminary investigation in the primary and secondary schools in Guizhou province,questionnaires were designed for targeted teachers,parents and students,attempting to collect different opinions and understandings to the implementation from school leaders,teachers,parents and students.Questionnaires for the influential factors research were mainly described in six aspects: policy problem factors,policy resources factors,executive subject factors,target group factors,operational mechanism factors,culture environmental factors.848 questionnaires were sent out to teachers,and806 effective ones were collected,106 questionnaires to parents and 86 effective ones were collected,1578 questionnaires to students and 1428 effective ones were collected.The recycling rate was 95.1%,81.0%,90.5%respectively.Data and graphs were mainly processed with SPSS20.0.And the author did interviews of the government officials in nutrition management offices in Bureaus of Education,and the students and head masters of middle and primary schools.The result shows that Nutrition Improvement Plan has been implemented well in Guizhou province.It shows that all the national pilot counties in Guizhou province have achieved the goal of the canteensoffering the nutrition meals to students.And it has been implemented in other local pilot counties.In general,the implementation of Nutrition Improvement Plan in primary and secondary school of rural area in Guizhou province,has provided meals for nearly 3.5 million students of national pilot counties and 300 thousand students of local pilot counties,which achieves the goal of ‘where there is a canteen,there are meals for everyone'.As a result,it improved nutritional status,academic achievement,and class attendance of the students,and reduced classroom weariness.So the parents and students are generally satisfied with this plan.However,some problems are also released: issues of food safety,misappropriation of funds,additional working load to teachers,configure different of canteen facilities between schools,lacking of supervision from parents,wasting,etc.Meanwhile,related factors to influence the implementation of Nutrition Improvement Plan are: insufficient supervision mechanism and the implementation system,lacking of necessary mechanism for rewarding and punishment;the ability of policy implementation and the sense of responsibility need to be improved;shortage of policy resources and unclear goals;the problem of nutrition meals itself is very complicated.and also lacking of good educational and cultural environment.Based on the researches above,effective strategies were put forward to improve the implementation of Nutrition Improvement Plan: building supervision and incentive mechanism,especially concrete measures in detail,to stimulate the enthusiasm of local government and the schools;strengthening the management of executive organization,to promote the diversification of the supervisor.strengthening policy training for administrators,promoting their awareness about the importance of the plan,to increase the executive efficiency;developing more operational implementation details to improve the operability of the policy;making clear finance investment proportion at all levels of local government in order to ensure adequate resources for the policy;furthermore,taking advantage of the welfare organizations for reducing financial burden;building a good environment for policy carrying out,and legislating for Nutrition Improvement Plan as soon as possible to provide legal protection for thelong-term implementation of Nutrition Improvement Plan.All in all,this dissertation focused on researching the prominent problems,main influential factors,and the policy advices to promote the implementation of Nutrition Improvement Plan,provide reference on the implementation of this plan,and contribute to the balanced development of urban and rural education.The difficulties of this dissertation was how to design the survey tools and put forward some targeted suggestions.The dissertation seeks innovations: on the research topic,Nutrition Improvement Plan is to improve the nutritional status of students in rural areas,improve the rural students' health level,which is an important policy to accelerate the development of rural education.But systematic and comprehensive researches in this field are still lack;on the research perspective,the study analyzes implementing issues and influential factors of Nutrition Improvement Plan,also puts forward policy suggestions from the perspective of public policy implementation,which made a certain degree of innovation;on the rearch method,the study applies the method of empirical study with data,to make the study supported by both theoretical and practical approaches.To present studies,due to the limitation of research experience,time and other factors,there are still some issues are under-researched,which will be improved in the following study.