School principals have come to a consensus that the quality of primary schools should be taken into consideration in the secondary school places allocation system the Education Commission is due to devise this year.
In a survey by the Subsidised Primary Schools Council in November, nearly 80 per cent of primary schools agreed that central allocation should be based on students' school results.
However, there should be a moderation mechanism to rate primary schools. Those that fared better should be allowed to send more than one third of their students to Band One schools, and vice versa, they said.
The survey results were revealed during a seminar on the issue, organised by the Chinese University School Heads Alumni Association.
Primary and secondary principals agreed that the percentage of students each school could send to Band One secondary schools should be based on the school's standard, because of the large variation in school quality.
In 2000, the Academic Aptitude Test (AAT), which underpinned the previous allocation system, was scrapped and the number of secondary school bands was reduced from five to three. This was intended to create a fairer system that put less pressure on primary pupils to drill for tests. The Education Commission would devise a new allocation system to be used from the 2005-2006 academic year. As an interim, students' internal results have been scaled by their primary schools' performance in the AAT from 1997 to 2000.