Image Source: Visual China

BEIJING, February 18 (TMTPOST) — China’s capital city Beijing has drafted a plan to ban mobile education applications that target children of pre-school age.

The Beijing Municipal Education Commission calls for a ban on all mobile education applications for children of pre-school age in a drafted notice released on February 16. The drafted notice was released to receive feedback from the public.

The mobile education applications that need to suspend operation according to the drafted notice include those that mainly target education professionals, students and parents, according to the notice. In addition, these mobile applications generally provide services in education and school management and learning.

It is worth noting that the drafted notice released by the Beijing Municipal Education Commission does not specify that the ban only applies to mobile applications on school curriculum learning. This means that all mobile education applications might be prohibited from providing online learning services for children of pre-school age.

The drafted notice is consistent with China’s double reduction policy launched in July 2021 that aims to reduce the academic burden on students.

It is already prohibited for businesses to provide online lessons for children of pre-school age in China, while offline tutoring is being closely monitored by the authorities.

The new development signifies that education businesses could only provide offline services that do not involve school curriculum in China.

In China, the pre-school education market is estimated to have a scale of 300 billion yuan, while the K9 education market has a scale of 500 billion yuan, a report from consulting firm Deloitte shows.

The double reduction policy has also impacted the pre-school education industry in China. The only listed online pre-school education service provider, iHuman (NYSE: IH), saw its share price fall by around 85% in 2021. The company’s share fell further on February 16 this year, reaching a record low.

Several Beijing-based education companies that focus on online pre-school education have already taken actions to mitigate the impact of the double reduction policy last year, halting admission of students of pre-school age or transitioning to other businesses, such as publication or offline education, Caijing reported.