National identity education is a form of education that fosters a stable sense of national identity among citizens and plays a crucial role in the sustainable development of the country. However, with the deepening of economic globalisation and cultural pluralism, pre-service teachers, in their dual roles as school students and prospective teachers, have encountered challenges in practicing their intention to implement national identity education. This study constructed a model of influencing pre-service teachers’ intention to implement national identity education based on the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) and the cognitive evaluation theory (CET) with the aim of explaining and analysing the development path of pre-service teachers’ educational intentions. The model was validated using PLS-SEM and fsQCA on data from 280 pre-service teachers in teacher training colleges in northern China. The PLS-SEM results indicated that subjective norms, relatedness need, and study resources directly and positively influenced pre-service teachers’ educational intentions, and study resources could also indirectly influence educational intentions through subjective norms and a need for relatedness. The fsQCA results indicated that a single variable was unable to predict and explain educational intentions. A total of five ways of influencing educational intentions emerged from the group analysis. Based on the pre-service teachers’ propensity to demand learning resources and their competence, pre-service teachers were categorised into four types—basic development pathway, internally driven pathway, competence-driven pathway and resource-supported pathway—and recommendations were made according to the degree of reliance on resources of different types of pre-service teachers as a way of providing theoretical and data support for the sustainable development of the country.