Curriculum policy implementation in China: Interactions between policy designs, place and people

In 2003, the new curriculum guidelines for senior secondary schools (SSS) and national curriculum standards for fifteen subjects were issued. Consequently, experiments in senior secondary school (SSS) curriculum reform were implemented in four provinces in 2004. This study adopts a framework of curriculum policy implementation comprising policy designs, place and people to examine, through four case studies, teachers’ responses to the implementation of the SSS curriculum reform in Guangzhou, the provincial city of Guangdong, one of the four ‘early-bird’ locations that implemented the SSS curriculum reform. It appears that the implementation of SSS curriculum reform encounters two major dilemmas or tensions such as coping with the requirements of the ‘curriculum standards’, and the demands of the CEE, and coping with the gap between resource and policy demands for realizing the curriculum reform and the actual ‘resource-stricken’ situation of many ordinary schools. Copyright © 2010 James Nicholas Publishers.