About 16 million children in China lack access to preschool education, Peking University researchers revealed at a recent conference.

Members of the university's China Institute for Educational Finance Research (CIEFR) found that rural children are still lagging far behind their urban peers when it comes to reaching developmental milestones, despite the 500 billion yuan ($74 billion) that was pumped into preschool education by central and local governments between 2010 and 2015.

The researchers' findings were unveiled just before the central government announced plans to clamp down on certain types of for-profit schools in a bid to level China's educational playing field.

China implemented its first three-year preschool education plan in 2010, which was extended in 2013 for another three years and is set to end in December. Under the plan, the central government invested more than 90 billion yuan while local governments spent over 400 billion yuan in a bid to improve preschool education nationally.

A policy blueprint published in 2015 announced that China's aim was to close the early-childhood development gap between poorer and richer children by 2020. However, the gap remains painfully wide for the millions of children, predominantly living in rural communities, who are unable to attend preschool.

Chinese preschools are called kindergartens, but are not equivalent to Western countries' public-school kindergartens, which are for 5- and 6-year-olds.

The divide has been made worse by major discrepancies in educational standards. When CIEFR researchers tested 1,800 3-to-6-year-olds attending kindergarten in five northwestern counties, they found that the children from rural communities had lower cognitive, verbal, and reading skills — and even weighed less — than their urban counterparts in the same county.

Inadequate early-childhood education can result in lower incomes in adulthood, perpetuating the cycle of poverty. The children of poorer rural migrants at 100 unregistered Beijing kindergartens fared even worse than the northwestern kindergartners, when put through the same tests, researchers said.

Song Yingquan, a professor at CIEFR, told Caixin that the unequal distribution of education funds has exacerbated the growing divide between rural and urban children. In 2014, preschool education accounted for 3.54% of total government spending on education in the average province, but many more affluent cities like Shanghai spent more than 9%.

Research from CIEFR shows that 90% of the central government's investments were aimed at improving state-run kindergartens, especially in terms of physical infrastructure.

The kindergarten attendance rate among Chinese children grew from 50.9% in 2009 to 75% in 2015, but researchers found that it was mostly private, rather than state-run, kindergartens that were responsible for this increase.

Contact editor Calum Gordon (calum@caixin.com)