BEIJING - China's education ministry on Thursday unveiled a newly-instituted evaluation and supervision system used to promote the nation's secondary vocational education system.

Local education authorities will be evaluated on their policy-making, financial input in vocational education and finer criteria such as local vocational education infrastructure construction, teacher quality and policy innovation, among others, according to the evaluation and supervision system.

The Ministry of Education (MOE) said in a statement posted on its official website that the system, established at the end of 2011, emerged against a backdrop of rapid development in the vocational education system and various problems that popped up in the meantime.

Secondary vocational education has developed rapidly in recent years, to the extent that its enrollment scale rivaled that of senior high schools, as local governments rolled out policies to spur vocational education, the statement said.

However, a raft of problems surfaced, including a divergence between curriculum and market demand, low quality and low business involvement, among others, according to the statement.

While drawing on the best practices from Germany, Japan and other countries with advanced vocational education systems, the MOE has developed the evaluation and supervision system also based on relevant statistics, field investigations in eight provincial regions, interviews with local education officials and 320,000 questionnaires handed out to enterprises, vocational teachers, students, and parents.