The goal of language education in Hong Kong is for every student to become biliterate in Chinese and English, and trilingual in Cantonese, Putonghua and English. For a largely monolingual society, that is very ambitious.
Fluency in Cantonese is not an issue because the dialect is spoken in most homes and in the street. Achieving fluency in Putonghua requires the learner to make an effort, but that is achievable for most because all Chinese dialects are based on the same written script.
Mastering English, a foreign tongue, is much more difficult. During more than 150 years of British rule that ended in 1997, English failed to become popular among the Chinese population, who outnumbered the English-speaking community. It did not help that Hong Kong had an elitist education system well into the early 1980s.
Although all agree that English is vital to Hong Kong's continued prosperity, it is not widely spoken. For most students, the classroom is where they are exposed to English, and usually not from native speakers.
The ideas being considered by the Standing Committee on Language Education and Research to boost the teaching of English, such as paying English teachers more, reducing their workload, and making lessons more interesting, have all been mooted before.
Since additional resources are already being used to hire native English teachers from overseas, a case could be made to pay local English teachers more to entice more qualified recruits to join their ranks. But overcoming industrial opposition to the idea of paying some teachers more than their colleagues will be difficult.