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The following is a speech by the Secretary for Education and Manpower, Mr Joseph W P Wong, at the Hong Kong-Canada Business Association Luncheon in Toronto, Canada on Thursday (April 15):
Mr Kowalski and friends of Hong Kong,
Thank you for inviting me to the luncheon today. I am delighted to be given this opportunity, whilst I am in Toronto, to speak to representatives from the business and education sectors, and friends from the media on various new education initiatives in Hong Kong, and some of the employment and business opportunities which these developments present.
Canada and Hong Kong have always maintained a close relationship in various areas, including cultural exchange and social ties. Indeed, a substantial number of Hong Kong people have settled in Canada, including some of our relatives and friends. We have of course also established close business ties. Canada was Hong Kong's fifteenth largest trading partner in 1998. Reciprocally, Hong Kong was Canada's seventh trading partner in 1997. The total trade between Hong Kong and Canada amounted to HK$30 billion (Can $ 6 billion) in 1998. As at June 1998, 13 Canadian companies have their regional headquarters located in Hong Kong, and 23 Canadian companies have set up their regional offices here. I have no doubt many of our education projects will offer excellent opportunities for more businesses between the two places.
Hong Kong's heavy investment in education
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The 1999-2000 budget has just been passed by the Legislative Council two weeks ago. Education remains the biggest single item of public expenditure. In 1999-2000, about 19 per cent of the total government expenditure, or $ 55 billion (Can $ 11 billion) will be spent on education. Despite the current economic downturn, I am pleased to say that total expenditure on education will grow by 7.9 per cent, compared to an estimated GDP growth of 0.5 per cent in real terms for the coming year. The increase for basic education will be even more significant, i.e. 11 per cent. All these are testimony to the strong commitment and importance we attach to education, which provides the foundation for the development of our society.
The Government's huge investment in education offers many opportunities for individuals and businesses, both local and overseas, to join us in collaborative efforts to continuously upgrade the quality of education for our young generation.
Hong Kong's language in education policy
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Hong Kong students face a unique language environment, and our policy is to enable our students to be biliterate and trilingual. Since our community is essentially Cantonese Chinese, we speak Cantonese and read and write Chinese in our daily life. As we re-unite with the Mainland and have more frequent contacts with our motherland, the use of Putonghua increases. Hence, we are actively promoting the learning of Putonghua in schools. At the same time, Hong Kong is an international business, financial and trading centre, and English is the language of business worldwide. To maintain a good standard of English is crucial to our economic competitiveness.
I wish to take this opportunity to dispel the misconception that we are attaching less importance to the learning of English in schools. On the contrary, we have adopted additional measures to raise the standard of English of our students at all levels. These include the introduction of an enhanced Native-speaking English Teacher Scheme in 1998-99 school year, additional recurrent grants to support English teaching in schools using Chinese as the medium of instruction, setting of language benchmarks for teachers and the funding of worthwhile language projects through the Language Fund (a fund set up with the specific objective of improving language teaching and learning in schools).
Today I would like to specifically talk about the Native English-speaking Teacher Scheme (NET Scheme) and language benchmarks for teachers, as I believe these two issues might interest some of you.
The Native English-speaking Teacher Scheme
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Since 1987, the Government has encouraged secondary schools to employ native-speakers as English teachers. An enhanced NET Scheme was introduced in the 1998-99 school year. The role of NETs is to act as English language resource teachers in schools. Besides being responsible for classroom teaching and assessment, they assist in school-based teacher development and help foster an enabling environment for students to speak English and improve their oral skills.
We have secured funding to recruit up to 750 NETs over five years from the 1998-99 school year to enable each public-sector secondary school to be provided with one NET over and above its teacher establishment. Schools adopting Chinese as the medium of instruction are allowed to fill one of their additional English Teacher posts with an NET. As at April 1999, over 380 NETs have been recruited and deployed to 365 schools. The overall feedback from schools and NETs has been positive on the effectiveness of the scheme. To tap the widest possible pool of candidates, we launch our recruitment exercise in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain and the United States. Right now, we have 84 NETs who came from Canada. There will be 87 NET vacancies in the 1999-2000 school year, and we welcome more English teachers from Canada, especially those who have experience in teaching English as a second language, to join our schools in a challenging and rewarding mission. Indeed, I am highly encouraged to note that for this year's recruitment exercise, we have received close to 1,000 applications, and the largest number (around 25 per cent) come from Canada.
Language benchmarks for teachers
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As language is an essential medium for teaching, we have decided to set up language benchmarks for all new and serving teachers to enhance the effectiveness of teaching and learning across all subjects. We are in the process of developing the assessment framework and finalising the benchmarks for new teachers in the 2000 school year.
Our serving teachers will be given a fixed period to meet the benchmarks. The Government has earmarked HK$72 million (Can $ 14 million) per annum to provide language training courses to help serving teachers enhance their language proficiency and reach the benchmark standards. In this connection, we very much welcome the participation of overseas institutions, in particular those with experience in teacher education, in the provision of the English language courses. The commissioning of the courses will be done through open tendering process.
Promoting information technology in education
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In the information world of today, there are few areas of our everyday life which are not touched by information technology (IT) in one form or another. A prominent feature of the information world is the phenomenal growth of the Internet. The ever-expanding Internet and the increasing pervasiveness of the use of IT will transform the way the commercial world conducts business and how governments deliver their services to the community. In education, this world trend will cause a paradigm shift in the utilisation of new methods and media in teaching and learning, and how our education system should prepare our students to face the IT revolution.
In November last year, we launched a five-year IT strategy through a policy paper entitled 'Information Technology for Learning in a New Era', which sets out a challenging vision on how we should:
a) turn our schools into dynamic and innovative learning institutions;
b) enable our students to acquire a broad knowledge base and a global outlook;
c) develop in our students capabilities to process information effectively and efficiently; and
d) inculcate in students the attitude and capability for independent life-long learning.
We have set aside a significant amount of resources, totalling HK$ 3200 million (Can $ 630 million) in capital investment and HK$ 550 million (Can $ 110 million) in recurrent expenditure, for the implementation of a series of IT initiatives. Through the effective use of IT, we hope to provide students with a richer school life, and to better prepare them for future studies and employment. The initiatives include:
a) provision of about 85,000 training places at various competency levels for teachers;
b) provision of computers to all schools and technical support through contract service;
c) fostering the development of more and better education software; and
d) conducting a feasibility study with a view to establish an education-specific Intranet.
In this context, there are numerous business opportunities associated with the provision of hardware and software, technical support and manpower training. Whilst the commissioning process for some of the above projects have already started, a lot of the projects will be of an on-going nature, and some will be of relatively long-term. In particular, I think the development of education software and the Intranet present truly exciting opportunities for collaboration amongst the Government, the private sector, tertiary institutions and schools. We welcome the participation of both local and overseas entities in all of these activities. As usual, we will tender through an open and fair process, and we make available all the relevant information in the Hong Kong SAR government gazette as well as the Education Department Website.
In addition, we plan to provide over HK$170 million (Can $33 million) to improve IT training in vocational education. We will upgrade the IT infrastructure of the technical colleges and institutes under the Vocational Training Council, which provide technician and technologist training, and training in information systems and software engineering. In due course, students will be able to access course materials via the Internet from anywhere in the campus or from their homes.
Our universities are also working hard to stay in the forefront of IT development. The University of Hong Kong has recently set up the first authorised Java Campus in the World which offers training in Java technology to the university's students as well as business executives and IT practitioners. The Chinese University of Hong Kong, together with other tertiary institutions, have embarked on the Hong Kong Cyber Campus project which will link up universities, secondary and primary schools in Hong Kong. The project will allow teachers, students and the community to interact on-line and to obtain and share educational resources.
I believe these exciting developments present great opportunities for joint efforts by the business world, schools and tertiary institutions to build new information infrastructure, which will not only improve the effectiveness and quality of education, but also foster Hong Kong's growth and further development.
Non-local education programmes offered in Hong Kong
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Hong Kong people are famous for their insatiable desire to learn and better themselves. We have therefore attracted a large number of overseas tertiary institutions to offer various education programmes locally, including many which offer formal qualifications, either through face-to-face instruction, or in the distance-learning mode. As a quality assurance mechanism, we have introduced legislation to ensure that courses offered in Hong Kong are run by recognised institutions; that their standard is comparable to that of similar ones conducted in the home country; and that the comparability is recognised by the institutions concerned. At present, five tertiary institutions from Canada are offering six courses in Hong Kong. I believe courses of good quality will always have a market in Hong Kong. This is even more so at a time when Hong Kong is going through an economic adjustment, and many people are trying to equip themselves for a better career.
Hong Kong-Canadian MOU on Co-operation in Information and Communications Technology
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A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed in May 1998 by the governments of Canada and Hong Kong to promote co-operation and exchange between the two places on information and communication technology. I understand that as a result of the MOU, there have been on-going discussions and visits of IT delegations between Hong Kong and Canada in the past months to explore opportunities for joint ventures and co-operation. This was the first bilateral agreement on IT co-operation that Hong Kong has made with its partners. This also laid a platform to facilitate investments and exchange between the two places in the rapidly developing IT area.
The Cyberport Project
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Last but not least, I would like to mention another massive IT project in Hong Kong, which falls outside the education area, but should interest many of you. On 4 March, the Financial Secretary announced in his Budget Speech that we will launch the Cyberport project, a project aimed at providing a specially designed environment for the development of leading edge IT applications and services to support businesses and industries ranging from financial services, trading, advertising, entertainment to communications. A leading information services company in the private sector has agreed in principle to partner with the Government to develop this project, which is estimated to cost HK$13 billion (Can $ 2.5 billion). The Cyberport will cater for the needs of multinational corporations, as well as smaller local companies through the provision of shared facilities, such as multi-media laboratories and broadband telecommunication infrastructure. I am sure many IT companies in Canada will take an interest in this far-sighted project.
Conclusion
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Indeed, there are ample scope for exchange and business between Canada and Hong Kong on the education and IT fronts. I encourage those of you who are interested in any of the projects I have mentioned to get in touch with either my colleagues from Hong Kong or our Toronto Office. We will be most happy to render the assistance you need. Thank you.
End/Friday, April 16, 1999
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