Evaluation of school sports coach position policies in China based on the PMC Index Model

In 2023, the General Administration of Sport of China, the Central Institutional Organization Commission Office, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security jointly issued the Implementation Opinions on Establishing Coaching Positions in Schools, positioning school sports coaches as an important mechanism for integrating sports and education. Provincial authorities subsequently introduced supporting measures. This study evaluates the internal structure, completeness, and consistency of these policy documents to identify design strengths and weaknesses and inform future policy refinement.

Twelve formally promulgated policy documents issued between 2022 and 2024 were selected using explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria. Policy text mining, a two-round Delphi consultation with 15 experts, and content analysis were used to construct a Policy Modeling Consistency (PMC) index model. Nine of ten conceptual first-level variables, comprising 38 s-level indicators, entered the PMC calculation. Policy texts were coded using a documented coding manual by a single coder, with consistency assessed through blind test-retest re-coding. Descriptive statistics and sensitivity analyses examined indicator discrimination and ranking robustness.

The mean PMC index was 6.29 (SD = 0.523; range = 5.57-7.22). Ten policies were classified as good and two as excellent. Policy level (X4) and policy domain (X9) showed zero variance and therefore did not discriminate among policies. Among the seven discriminating variables, mean scores were highest for participating actors (X6 = 0.92) and policy focus (X3 = 0.88), and lowest for policy timeliness (X2 = 0.06), policy evaluation (X8 = 0.73), and guarantee and incentives (X7 = 0.75). Removing X4 and X9 left the ranking unchanged (Spearman ρ = 1.0000), while additionally removing X2 produced only a marginal change (ρ = 0.9926). However, grade classifications varied substantially across specifications.

The policies are comparatively complete across the measured design dimensions but remain weak in timeliness, evaluation, and guarantee and incentive mechanisms. Only three documents specify a policy time horizon, few include verifiable objectives, and supervision mechanisms are often insufficiently detailed. The PMC scores should therefore be interpreted as measures of structural completeness rather than implementation effectiveness, which requires separate implementation and outcome data.