Shanghai Second Light Industry School is a public full-time secondary vocational school established in 1982 with the approval of the Shanghai Municipal Government. It is under the supervision of the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission and managed by Shanghai Polytechnic University. It is a national key secondary vocational school, one of Shanghai’s Top 100 Secondary Vocational Schools, and a Model School for the Reform and Development of Secondary Vocational Education in Shanghai. The school has also been recognized as a Model School for Family Education, Rule of Law, Behavioral Norms, Party-Building, and Mental Health Education in Shanghai.

For 28 consecutive years, the school has earned the title of Shanghai Civilized Unit (Campus) and has been honored as an Outstanding Talent Training Institution at both the national and municipal levels for cultivating skilled talent.
The school emphasizes school-enterprise cooperation and welcomes enterprises onto campus. Three programs have been approved as Shanghai municipal-level pilots for the modern apprenticeship system. The school also jointly runs integrated secondary-to-undergraduate and secondary-to-higher vocational education pilot programs with several universities, all of which are progressing smoothly. Its international collaborations, such as with Dong-Eui University in South Korea, have produced strong results.

Over its more than 40 years of development, the school has continually raised the level of its programs and deepened its educational quality. It has established a distinctive “One Core, Two Wings” model, with the animation and game program group as the core, and tourism service and computer-related majors as the two wings. The animation and game program was among the first to be recognized as a model brand major in Shanghai. The school hosts both the Shanghai Animation and Game Program Open Training Center and the Shanghai E-sports Operation and Management Program Open Training Center.

The Art Design and Production major plays a vital role in supporting and advancing the animation and game program group. Faculty and students from the school have repeatedly won first-place awards in national vocational education skills competitions.