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Review of kindergarten education. Don’t underestimate non-Chinese speaking children with special needs

2021-09-03T09:43:31.117Z


The Education Bureau completed a review report on the kindergarten education plan on August 25. Its content rejected the salary scale of kindergarten teachers and became the focus of discussion in the industry. However, the report did not focus much on students, especially the special schools where apologizes most in need.


The Education Bureau completed a review report on the kindergarten education plan on August 25. Its content rejected the salary scale of kindergarten teachers and became the focus of discussion in the industry. For Chinese-speaking children, although the financial support provided by the authorities has increased in recent years, there is still room for improvement in the specific support and safety of the Education Bureau and the Social Welfare Department.


The report pointed out that the government’s expenditure on educational support measures for non-Chinese speaking students increased to 456 million yuan in the 2020/21 school year, an increase of 87% from five years ago. Under the Early Childhood Education Program, there are also a number of new measures and resources for non-Chinese speaking students. Including five levels of subsidies based on the number of non-Chinese speaking children admitted, and kindergartens with at least eight non-Chinese speaking children can receive subsidies equivalent to the annual salary of a teacher.

According to the Education Bureau, a comprehensive review of the implementation of kindergarten education policies will begin in mid-2019, and reviewing teacher remuneration arrangements is one of the key points.

Related consulting work is still ongoing, and the entire review is expected to be completed in 2021.

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Subsidies for non-Chinese speaking students should be improved

However, the Education Bureau's funding criteria for the relevant projects are open to question.

There are nearly 200 kindergartens enrolling one to four non-Chinese speaking children in the 2020/21 school year, each with a subsidy of 51,400 yuan. In fact, it is not enough to hire half a teacher.

With at least five children enrolling at least half of the teacher’s salary subsidy, kindergartens enrolling only one to four non-Chinese speaking children account for 46%. However, even if there is only one such student at any level, The school has to spend extra energy to take care of it, and the negative impact should not be underestimated.

Regarding children with special needs (SEN), the review report stated that the Bureau of Labor and Welfare has regularized the "Pre-school Rehabilitation Service Pilot Program at Schools" and increased the number of service places to 10,000 in the 2022/23 school year.

At first glance, this number may sound high, but in fact, as of the end of last year, the program has served more than 8,000 school children.

Moreover, if the situation of schoolchildren has a special need to receive more comprehensive care, the "Kindergarten-cum-Child Care Centre Integrated Scheme" or special child care center is always a better choice. However, the places for both are still very short. School children have to wait for more than one year at any time. At that time, he has been promoted to a new class or even to Primary One at any time, and missed the opportunity for early interventional treatment.

In recent years, society has become more concerned about the situation of students with special learning needs (SEN).

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The 10,000 support quota for SEN students is only superficial

In order to solve the above problems, the bureau must review the funding criteria for the relevant schools. For example, it is based on the salary of hiring a teacher, coupled with the progressive model of the number of students. In the long run, schools should be required to hire students who have completed Chinese as a second language training. Teachers, rather than just mobilize existing teachers to cope.

In addition, in addition to mandating all kindergarten teachers to participate in on-the-job training, the authorities should also try to narrow the teacher-student ratio in early childhood education. They should also consider mandating permanent full-time support teachers in schools, or adding regular social workers to kindergartens to help identify cases and work in progress. Counselling for families of schoolchildren.

Pre-school education is the starting point for personal growth. It helps children develop their potential, build up interpersonal communication skills, and make it easy to adapt to primary school life.

Since non-Chinese and Chinese-speaking children have always been different from Chinese-speaking children in terms of cultural and language backgrounds, and special needs children’s performance in individual learning skills may be different from those of ordinary students, society should devote more resources to make up for the differences between these groups. The difference in learning ability prevents schoolchildren from losing their motivation to learn due to too much difference.

The report on the review of kindergarten education only used a relatively short space to review and plan the measures for the two types of children. This worries that the Education Bureau is self-sufficient.

There are still many people in Hong Kong who squeeze them out, believing that they are inherently inadequate, and the government is even more obliged to eliminate misunderstandings through financial and teacher support.

The school sports guidelines failed to implement to the end. Administrative needs are people-oriented. The government owes students a start-of-school gift. The salary scale of kindergarten teachers is "numbered". Officials must know how to overcome difficulties

Source: hk1

All news articles on 2021-09-03

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