There are 350 million children enrolled in further education across China, but Chinese School takes as its subject one small town in rural Anhui, and focuses on the lives of a group of families, teachers and children during the course of a single academic year.

They are schools like many thousands of others across this vast nation, but through the individual stories of hardship, joy and success, an extraordinary portrait emerges of a nation, a town and a group of children in the midst of enormous change.