Chinese students forced to climb cliff face almost a kilometre high to get to school

Several people have died making the same journey

These are the incredible images of what is possibly the world’s toughest school run.

Students from the Atuler village in Sichuan province, China, must scale an 800 metre cliff on rattan ladders in order to get to class. Some of the children are as young as six.

Local authorities have promised to intervene after the publication of the pictures in Chinese media led to an outcry.

Seven people are reported to have died making the journey.

The photos were taken by a staff photographer for the Beijing News, Chen Jie, who followed a party of parents who were picking their children up. The journey requires scrambling over sheer rock faces and using old ladders.

“I was shocked,” the photographer wrote on social media. He said the scene was an “extremely difficult, perilous common experience” which “the heart is still heavy” from.

He added that he used his camera to tell a “thrilling story, eventually to bring about change.”

Despite some progress in recent years, poverty remains rife in China’s rural regions. Some of the village people cannot afford to send their children to the school, while others choose not to for safety reasons.

The children now board at the school, returning home every two weeks.

Constructing a safer route to the school would prove too costly for the local population but since the pictures were published, offers to develop infrastructure have been coming in from all over China.

Mr Jie said he was “very nervous” about the trip and had been warned to be careful by local officials. “It is precisely because they say it is very dangerous that I decided to risk recording this place,” the photographer added. “It provoked my impulse.”