Haihe Education Park, located at the south bank of Haihe River that runs through the central urban area and Binhai New District in Tianjin, takes up 37 square kimometers that could enroll 200,000 students and 300,000 for on-the-job training, with a permanent resident population of 100,000.

It is a national pilot zone for vocational education reform.

Apart from being a national pilot zone for vocational education reform, the park is also a center for high-tech research and development, and an ecological living community. As the key project of Tianjin’s city space planning, it integrates high quality vocational education resources.

The layout of the park has a central ecological belt and alongside the two sides are school campuses, residential areas as well as related facilities.

The first phase of the project takes up 10 square kilometers, started in June 2009 and finished in April 2011. There are 7 vocational schools with 65,000 teachers and students. The total building area is 1.33 million square meters, with teaching buildings, the park management center, international exchange center, public practical training center, and libraries. The green area is 5.3 million square meters. The park is the permanent competition field for national vocational skills contest, and has organized many annual events. The Ninth University Games of the People’s Republic of China was held here in 2012 and part of the events of the Sixth East Asian Games were also held here in 2013. The park changes the traditional teaching model into a more dynamic and modern system.

The second phase, taking up 14 sq km, started to be built in December 2011, and now it is the home of Tianjin technical workers, and has two vocational schools, Youth Vocational College and Business Vocational College. Nankai University and Tianjin University also have their new campuses in the zone, and in the autumn of 2015, the campuses welcomed their first group of students. The emerging subjects, interdisciplinary subjects and some applied sciences of Nankai University have moved here, including 14 departments, 13,000 students and 2,000 teaching staff. Tianjin University also has 12 departments and about 20,000 students on the new campus. Tianjin Broadcasting and Television University also locates here.

By 2020, the park will have 20 schools in it, covering kindergartens, primary schools, middle schools, vocational schools, higher institutions, and training institutions, bringing the benefits of high quality educational resource concentration.

As the only national vocational education reform pilot zone, the park insists on integration, green and high quality development concepts, and largely promoting the interaction of campuses, residential areas, and industrial zones, restoring ecological system by protecting wetlands, using clean energy, and advancing environment protection. It applied lean management in each area of the park development, from park planning and management, social causes, investment attraction, and industrial development.