China's Ministry of Education (MOE) will carry out a strategic project to nurture high-caliber teachers across the country, an official with the ministry said Thursday, noting that progress has been made in this regard over the years.

Weng Bo, deputy director of the ministry's department of teachers, told a press conference that by the end of 2022, over 81 percent of the country's full-time teachers in compulsory education had a bachelor's degree or above, up 3.3 percentage points from the previous year.

In rural areas, the figure was about 76 percent, rising 3.78 percentage points from 2021, Weng added.

By the end of last year, China had a total of 18.8 million full-time teachers, according to Weng.

In 2022, the Organization Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, the MOE and other government organs jointly initiated a program aimed at enhancing education in less developed counties in the west amid the country's rural revitalization drive.

As part of this program, school principals and other education professionals from the more developed eastern regions were chosen to serve in the less developed areas of the country in a bid to ensure that each of these counties has at least one regular high school and one vocational high school.

A total of 2,392 high school principals, management personnel and teachers were selected and assigned to work at 160 key counties in 10 provincial-level regions in western China through this initiative, according to the ministry.

Meanwhile, the MOE will push forward reforms on the administration of teachers as part of efforts to support high-quality education, Weng added.