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To promote the development of early childhood education, the Education and Manpower Bureau (EMB) has put in place various policies and measures in support of the kindergarten (KG) sector. It also encourages KGs to build up a self-improving culture and promote teachersˇ¦ professional development to enhance education quality for the benefits of young children.
Speaking at the Third Committee Meeting and Seminar of the Council of Non-profit Making Organizations for Pre-primary Education today (October 21), the Permanent Secretary for Education and Manpower, Mrs Fanny Law, said, ˇ§The Government attaches great importance to the investment in education. The Policy Address 2006, recently delivered by the Chief Executive, has put emphasis on early childhood education. This shows our sincerity and commitment to early childhood education.ˇ¨
New measures include allocating $70 million as a one-off Capacity Enhancement Grant for all KGs to acquire more teaching resources; providing "education vouchers" to parents of children aged three to six for use on fee subsidy and teacher training; ensuring teaching quality through enhanced schoolsˇ¦ transparency and classroom inspection.
Mrs Law said, "While the Government has played its supportive role in the reform, schools' cooperation is also indispensable. We believe a bottom-up and internalised improvement plan can better ensure a sustainable school development. The reform within schools hinges on a change to their management culture. They have to make good use of external forces to change their culture from 'regulatory' to 'collaborative'.
"It was against this background that the Government introduced Quality Assurance Inspection (QAI) for KGs and the Performance Indicators for pre-primary institutions in 2000. When QAI teams conducted inspections to the first batch of 20 KGs in the 2000/01 school year, almost half of them were not familiar with the concept of school self-evaluation, whereas another half focused their evaluation merely on teachers' performance and certain teaching activities. Only one of them managed to complete a rather comprehensive review."
"Progressively, most of the schools which underwent inspections in the 2005/06 school year had been able to conduct a comprehensive review. Some of them could even make good use of evaluation findings to formulate school development plans. Many schools realised that learning and teaching should be their key task. Based on self-evaluation, schools could adjust their governance structure, enhance home-school collaboration and inject community resources to increase the effectiveness of learning and teaching."
"To help schools conduct self-evaluation and promote professional development, we have set up a pre-primary education support team in September to forge partnership with teachers and promote school development, assisting them in forming a 'learning community' with sustainable development."
"In the future, we will strengthen the quality assurance mechanism for early childhood education, including increasing schoolsˇ¦ transparency and stepping up inspection to ensure education quality," she added.
Professionalism of teachers and principals is the key to raising KG education quality. Over the past few years, all KG principals have made efforts and obtained the Certificate in Early Childhood Education, while all teachers have attained the Quality Kindergarten Teacher qualification. Through the new funding mode put forward by the Policy Address, the Government encourages all KG teachers to pursue further studies and obtain a Diploma in Early Childhood Education, whereas KG principals a degree.
Mrs Law pointed out that early childhood education is the foundation of learning. Besides conveying knowledge, KG teachers also need to foster children's natural curiosity, motivate them to explore and learn, inspire their creativity and teach them to apply what they have learnt in a flexible manner.
Noting that many parents are enthusiastic to provide their young children with a variety of learning activities, she suggested early childhood education workers help parents better understand what quality early childhood education is and the importance of respecting the varied abilities of children and giving them room to excel. Only through pleasurable learning experience can children develop their potential to the fullest.
Mrs Law said that the EMB appreciated cooperation and communication with the KG sector. She hoped that all stakeholders would make a concerted effort to put the new initiatives in place, raising the quality of early children education to pave the way for a brighter tomorrow for children.
Ends/Saturday, October 21, 2006
Issued at HKT 15:46
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