As chief of the education bureau in Nanping's Yanping district, in the north of Fujian province, Zhang Zhixiong said his paramount task is ensuring that children can enjoy better education.

China's education system provides nine years of free, compulsory education — six years in primary school and three at junior high school. Students can then move on to three years of senior high school.

"We want to innovate our educational philosophy and management mode by building a nine-year school in Yanping — the Kaiyuan Experimental School," Zhang said, adding that the district's newly adopted open education model had opened up a new era for education.

The new school, built with an investment of 112.31 million yuan ($15.4 million) and covering 3.74 hectares, began to admit students in September. It is able to accommodate 24 primary school classes and 12 junior high school classes.

Huang Guicheng, Party secretary of the Yanping District Committee of the Communist Party of China, said residents' calls for high-quality education had meant the district needed to transform from closed education to open education.

Huang said that to lift the quality of teaching in the district, it had invited schools in more developed parts of the province to offer assistance and cooperation.

In October, the Kaiyuan Experimental School and the Binlang Primary School and the Binlang High School in the Siming district of Xiamen, in southern Fujian, held an online signing ceremony that led to the formation of teaching cooperation pairs and moral education cooperation pairs between teachers from the schools in the two districts.

Xu Huajuan, the chief of Siming's education bureau, said their joint efforts will boost the rapid development of the Kaiyuan Experimental School.

Gao Zichong, from Class 2 of Kaiyuan's seventh grade, said: "Teachers from Xiamen often give us online and on-site lectures, and our school is equipped with many new teaching facilities. The principal said we will visit the research and learning base of our cooperative school in Xiamen next spring and I am looking forward to that day."

Ye Shengzhi, the father of another seventh grade student at Kaiyuan, said: "With the new school and the new educational model, our children can enjoy high-quality educational resources at our doorstep."

The cooperation has started to bear fruit. Rao Bizhen, leader of the English teaching and research team at Kaiyuan, said 10 of her colleagues have finished online teaching exchanges and on-site visits for learning.

Yu Peiyang, an official from Yanping's education bureau, said a record 23 of the 37 excellent examples of work it sent for appraisal this year won Excellent Homework Design Awards for the Compulsory Education Stage in Fujian.

Guo Caifu, deputy director of the district government's education supervision office, said: "With the new progress, we will make advances through diligent work, and achieve excellence through steady progress."