Students of a vocational school in Lanzhou, Southwest China’s Gansu province show a globe-shaped Luban lock made by themselves on November 24, 2016. The traditional Chinese puzzle is formed by 12 precise metal parts. Lu Ban Lock is an educational toy invented by a famous ancient Chinese carpenter named Lu Ban. Each piece of the lock is interconnected without fixtures and players have to unlock the gadget and put the pieces back together. (Photo: China News Service/ Liu Yutao)

Secondary vocational schools have played an active role in poverty alleviation, according to an evaluation report on vocational education released by China's Ministry of Education.

There are 347 secondary vocational schools enrolling nearly 600,000 students in areas of extreme poverty. Around 142,000 vocational graduates from these schools found jobs in 2017, with the employment rate exceeding 90 percent, said the report.

More than 2.5 million students at secondary vocational schools across China received scholarships and grants in 2017, half of whom were from the country's western areas, it said.

China had a total of 10,671 secondary vocational schools nationwide in 2017. About 15.9 million full-time students were enrolled at such schools, accounting for 40 percent of the total number of the country's senior high students, the report said.

In 2017, 840,000 full-time teachers worked at secondary vocational schools across China, with the student-teacher ratio at 19:1, according to the report.

Conditions concerning teaching devices and resources continued to be upgraded to improve education quality, it added.

The evaluation was conducted by the Shanghai Academy of Educational Sciences in 2018, based on information collected from more than 6,800 vocational schools nationwide and some 340,000 questionnaires.