Vocational & Technical Education

The basic task for vocational and technical education is to cultivate talents of various levels, who are in urgent demand for the national economic development. To cater to the need of economic construction, early in the 1950s, China established and developed over 1,000 secondary vocational and technical schools. By 1965, students in secondary vocational schools, vocational high schools, and technical schools totaled 1.422 million, which laid the foundation for modern vocational technical education. After 1980, secondary vocational education developed rapidly, and the irrational structure of secondary education was gradually being adjusted. For three consecutive years since 1996, students in secondary schools reached over 10 million annually. According to statistics, in 1998, the advanced secondary vocational schools of various types in the country amounted to 17,106, with the students totaling 11.26 million.

1. Contribution to Improvement of the Structure of Secondary Education

For a long period of time, the structure of secondary education in China remained irrational, and vocational and technical education was weak. The situation began to change to a certain extent after 1980, but still could not meet the needs of social development. In the 1980s, about 6 million primary students, 6 million junior middle school students and over 1.8 million senior middle school students graduated each year. The students graduating from senior middle school went to work without any professional training, which led to the low quality of China's workforce, an impediment to the economic development and the effort to improve efficiency. To solve the problem, since the mid-1980s, the Chinese Government has introduced many measures to develop vocational education. Potential was tapped in the existing secondary vocational and technical schools by enrolling more students, while a group of senior middle schools were changed to be vocational high schools or opened vocational training courses. By and by, running vocational and technical schools by the whole of society has gradually taken shape.