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1 1 A New Age for Preschool Education 幼教新时代，“众”力应万变 Popular Beijing’s preschool team responded swiftly and demonstrated great foresight in the face of massive challenges. 尽管直面巨大挑战，北京大众幼教以远见卓识，展现迅速应变的能力。 The year of 2020 was unusual, and was filled with anxiety for many people in the preschool education industry in China. Apart from being significantly affected by the pandemic, China’s preschool education also saw a great change in national policy, with 90% of preschools following state-prescribed limits on fees, resulting in fairer prices. Facing changes in the market, Popular Beijing Early Childhood Education Manager Han Liang led the team in embracing change and facing challenges. Rapidly Creating New Online Products To keep the pandemic from spreading to campuses, the government announced the postponement of the spring semester on 29 January 2020. Local departments of education were required to ensure that the students’ learning continued despite the suspension of classes. Just four days later, we launched two programmes, one focusing on the first preschool lesson for toddlers and another on online learning for intermediate to advanced levels. Each of these two-month-long programmes included comprehensive contents, like pre-registration preparation and good habits to develop when entering preschool, practice for key school skills, mini science experiments, and picture book recommendations. Nearly a thousand preschools shared our programmes online, reaching nearly 14,000 families. In mid-March, we launched the online training camp to help children with learning at home, which also let retailers and preschools find an alternative income to mitigate the impact of the pandemic. Retailers Conference Broadcast Live Such new channels are vital to POPULAR. Along with the establishment of an operations centre in the winter of 2018, Popular Beijing’s Marketing, Sales and Training departments have been working together to expand our market share in preschool education, an area that had been lacking behind in development hitherto. To date, we have signed over 150 distribution partners amid our steadily growing sales. 6- 6 p -p o op pu ul la a r r n n e e w ws s 1 13 3 3 3 By Qi Meng Jie (Beijing) 文:齐梦捷(北京)