Educational Expansion of the Upper Secondary Schools in Taiwan

After planning and designing “the Twelve-Year Compulsory Education Policy (TYCEP)” for 30 years, Ministry of Education in Taiwan finally officially announced in 2011 that the policy will be implemented in 2014. However, despite the Taiwanese government has promoted the policy for more than two years, the issue is still continuing to cause intense disputes and to gain numerous opposite views. In particular, the proportion of normal to vocational school students and the ratio of public to private schools, both of these two pre-existing structural issues of the upper secondary education in Taiwan will be the main problems to implement TYCEP.

Therefore, this study suggests that for TYCEP, it is necessary to clarify the importance of these two key issues and review the impacts on the educational opportunities for high school students.  Thus, this study aims to explore the history of educational expansion of Taiwan's upper secondary schools and to analyze backgrounds and major factors of developments of those two structural issues through the literature and field survey.  Furthermore, this study scrutinizes ideas, impacts, and challenges of TYCEP’s implementation.