Easing teachers' stress
About 46 per cent of Hong Kong's teachers are working at stress levels they call 'high' or 'very high', according to a report released last month. It was produced by the Committee on Teachers' Work, set up almost one year ago to look into teachers' stress. The report cited five main causes of the high stress levels: changes and innovations involving the teachers; pressures from external stakeholders; the need to pass tests such as the Language Proficiency Requirement; school management; and pupil-related issues.
Committee chairman Edmond Ko In-ming noted that frontline teachers were willing to deal with their work and manage the stress incurred as long as they were related to the teaching and development of students. 'What makes teachers angry is when they have to do non-teaching work', he said.
To improve the situation, the report recommended: conducting a school-based independent review of the situation; providing teachers with paid study leave; creating more permanent teaching posts; and improving the teacher-student ratio. No one would object to these proposals, but the response from teachers has been a bit cynical and unenthusiastic.
In the past decade, Hongkongers have faced the challenges of globalisation: the entire labour force has been pressured to raise productivity and work longer hours. Teachers are no exception. But quite a number of senior teachers in their early 50s have taken early retirement. And it was the suicides of two teachers that prompted the establishment of the committee, last February.
In general, teachers have accepted heavier teaching loads because they enjoy teaching. But they hate non-teaching work, seeing it as a top-down imposition by education authorities. They believe that such administrative work is not only unrelated to their role as teachers, but reduces the time they have for students.
This resistance to administrative duties obviously cannot be resolved by a few training programmes in administration - there is no lack of management expertise in schools. The crucial problem is an absence of a sense of ownership: teachers do not identify with the administrative tasks set by education authorities.
When education reforms were first raised about six years ago, the slogan was 'let our students go to school happily'. Now, not only do we fail to see students going to school happily, but teachers now share the same plight. The Education and Manpower Bureau has seriously failed to mobilise the enthusiastic support of teachers for education reforms.
Many teachers feel that the government has little respect for them. They think education authorities have not been working hard to solve teachers' problems stemming from the declining birth rate and the need to close schools.
Frontline teachers do not reject the ideals behind official policies. But they feel that they should have been consulted far more extensively on the implementation of reforms. In their view, senior officials make all the decisions, all the time.
When consultations are held, they are an exercise in dealing with pressures from lawmakers and the media. Teachers see no sincerity in such consultations. Since teachers have no sense of ownership, they see the administrative work associated with education reforms as a burden.
As for education authorities, they think the government has been generous in funding the city's education system, and that government spending must be accounted for. Hence they set up various objectives and indicators, and demand detailed reporting - generating substantial workloads and stress for teachers.
This pressure has in turn been exacerbated by the competition among schools - which are eager to score well under the new indicators and criteria.
It has been suggested that the voucher system should be expanded from kindergartens to primary and secondary schools - to provide more choices for parents and students. But if education authorities continue to engage in top-down management, the system will be constricted to the point where parents will have few meaningful options - unless they can afford private schools.
Joseph Cheng Yu-shek is a professor of political science at City University of Hong Kong
