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Review of Education System Consultation Document

21 July 2000

Education Commission Secretariat
Room 714, Central Government Offices
Main Wing, Lower Albert Road
Central, Hong Kong

Dear Sirs,

We are writing in response to the above consultation paper.

We are pleased that the Education Commission has carried out such a comprehensive review of the education system. We particularly agree with the "Aims of Education" stated in Chapter 2. The Reform Proposals, if successfully implemented, would be extremely useful to the Hong Kong community.

However, the Reform Proposals seem to have assumed that those who will be carrying out the reforms will face no opposition from the stakeholder and other vested interested groups. The Proposal further assumes that Education Department will do their job with 100% effectiveness and unbiased loyalty to stated aims.

There is also a lack of overall accountability – not just in the political sense, but also in the sense of putting in suitable management mechanism to ensuring the reform activities to be carried out by a bureaucracy will actually support the stated aims -- not rules and status quo.

Our main concern with the Reform Proposals is, therefore, more with implementations and less with the stated aims of Education Reform.

Our comments to Reform Proposal are summaried as follows:

• "Quality"(point 3.8) was stated in an uncomfortably vague and biased term. There’s no mentioning of a mechanism of how to account for "Quality". The downside risk equating "Quality" to "…providing opportunities to highly endowed students" is "Resources" being eaten up by the administrative overheads (i.e. the bureaucracy) and pet projects. And the teaching staff and students of the average schools not benefiting from increased spending.
• The society is asking for "Quality for All", not just "Quality for a Few".
• As there is no mentioning of how to use the experience of the front-line teaching staff, the six key components stated (point 4.1) also suggest a "Top Down" approach from the Education Department.
• As evident from controversy caused by the language benchmarking tests "imposed" on teachers by the Education Departments, the lack of a "Bottom Up" approach could mean disasters when the Reforms Proposals are being carried out.

• We agree with the aims stated and we particularly support the move toward "Learning how to Learn", "Project Learning" and reversion to "Basic Competency Assessments in Chinese, English and Mathematics" upon completion of primary education.

• Having rejected the idea of giving some supervisory power to the local government (i.e. District Councils) or district school boards, we’re further disappointed by the Education and Manpower Bureau and the Education Commission that no solid proposal is being put forward to implement school-based or district-based "Parent Teacher Councils".
• Access to information through "websites" or "e-mails" are not nearly enough to promote real accountability to "Parent Teacher Councils".
• Instead of paying lip services to Parents’ Involvement, the Education Department should consider implement more formal procedure of requiring school management to discuss school-based reforms or management initiatives with "Parent Teacher Councils" on a bi-annual basis.

• The Primary One Admission System now in practice, while convenient for the Education Department, is intensely disappointing to parents; at the same time, it takes away the initiatives for individual schools to improve themselves and to compete for students.
• Instead of lowering or maintaining the current 15% percentage of "discretionary places" primary schools are allowed, the percentage should be increased.
• A specific policy to encourage primary schools to run "Private Sections" where parents would also contribute a monthly school fee; this would allow some school to experiment with more progressive teaching methods or lower the class sizes.
• It is well known that Banding System (point 5.2.57) is detrimental to all the education aims stated in this Reform Proposals and we welcome the move to reform this system.
• We support the re-introduction of Basic Competency Assessments in Chinese, English and Mathematics (point 5.2.34) as a fair and open means and component for Secondary School Place Allocation.

• We largely agree what’s being said (section 3 of Chapter 5). However, we would like to point out the thinking behind the proposal is still very much restricted by the framework of a "Traditional Grammar Schools" and there is no reference to training students in technical careers – work that does not require much intellect but much skills.
• The move toward streaming students to technical education (e.g. computer skills, machine and engineering skills and cooking careers) will also help to remove the unpleasant stigma associated with the "Banding System".

• We would like to suggest that "A Diversified Higher Education System" (point 5.4.6) is not nearly as diversified as required by the needs of the society and the economy.
• There’s no focus on delivering technical education and technical career for students through highly diversified sub-degree courses delivered by the VTC, private institution, community college and universities.
• Many European countries have world-class technical education systems. Mapping careers for students who have no taste or talent for intellectual pursuits would also help to solve the "Banding" problem at secondary school level.
• We welcome the proposal to move toward development of private higher- education institutes; however, much more work need to be done before universities in Hong Kong would actually move towards this direction.

• We welcome to focus on this subject but would like to suggest that, currently, not enough incentives are provided to individuals to take on continuing education opportunities.
• Some sort of "Education and Training Coupon Systems" that provide opportunity to individuals, but at the same time provide incentives to training services providers to compete for students in the "Open Market" should be given serious considerations.

• One of the key components of success of education reform is re-training school principals and teachers to accept new teaching methods.
• We felt that teachers should also have continuing education opportunities at the Institute of Education and that the Reform Proposal has not given enough attention in this area.

• Quality education systems (e.g. the English School Foundation) do exist in Hong Kong.

• The Education Commission should consider the ESF as a model and set up a co-ordination and administrative body (Private School Foundation) for primary and secondary schools which are willing and able to go private.
• A similar model could also be considered for the co-ordination of converting some of the Band 4 and Band 5 school into excellent technical training resources through a "Technical School Foundation".

• As suggested earlier in this letter, the aims of the Reform Proposals are diversified and complex; therefore there is a real risk of failures at the implementation stage.
• We suggest the focus should now put on the management and implementation of the high-level aims and the stated strategies of how to achieve those aims; for example:

1. Setting priorities
2. Ensuring that reform activities and programmes actually support the stated aims
3. Co-ordination within the various programmes
4. Estimating how much resources need to be allocated
5. Periodic measurement of the success of each programme when aligned to the stated strategies.

We wish you every success and we hope our comments above have been useful.

Sincerely yours,

Alan Lung
Chairman
Hong Kong Democratic Foundation