Abstract

Engineering design is increasingly emphasised in primary STEM education, but references to engineering do not necessarily specify a connected design process. This study examined four Chinese national documents: the Compulsory Education Curriculum Plan (2022 Edition), the Compulsory Education Science Curriculum Standards (2022 Edition), the 2023 Opinions of the Ministry of Education and Seventeen Other Departments on Strengthening Science Education in Primary and Secondary Schools in the New Era, and the 2025 Guidelines for Science Education in Primary and Secondary Schools. They represent curriculum structure, engineering specifications, system-level support, and implementation responsibility. A comparative qualitative policy document analysis used deductive content analysis with provision for inductive coding. The corpus was segmented into 224 meaning units, each expressing a complete provision, responsibility, or support measure. Coding was organised into three families: engineering-design specification, teacher-enactment responsibilities, and implementation support. The Compulsory Education Science Curriculum Standards (2022 Edition) contained all 58 engineering-design-coded units. Among 16 recurring teacher-enactment requirements, 9 had relatively explicit support connections, and 7 had only partial or broader support. The analysis identifies complementary policy functions and partial rather than uniform alignment between teacher responsibilities and implementation support. Stronger links among curriculum guidance, professional learning, assessment support, and school resources could strengthen engineering-design enactment.