Hong Kong’s failure to keep track of truants stoking up problems for vulnerable youngsters, charity warns

Hong Kong’s young people are increasingly at risk of developing drug problems and other anti-social behaviours after it was revealed the government is failing to monitor the number of children playing truant, a charity has warned.

The city’s schools are required to report secondary school pupils who have been absent for seven consecutive days to the Education Bureau, but an investigation by the South China Morning Post has found the data is not being recorded.

The Post made an Access to Information request to the bureau for the number of days lost to truancy in the last academic year, but it could only provide the number of secondary school dropouts, which increased from 3,700 in the 2013/14 school year to 3,900 in 2014/15. The figure for 2015/16 was not yet available, a bureau spokeswoman said.

Sky Siu, executive director of KELY Support Group, which has provided holistic programmes for young people aged 14 to 24 since 1991, said the government’s failure to monitor truancy rates was a “big concern” because skipping school often led to other social problems.

“[Truancy] is a direct result of social disengagement,” she said. “The more children are disengaged with school, the more that leads to problems later in life, particularly in relation to substance abuse. Truancy puts you at a disadvantage. You have to find your place in society and in the family.

“Anything could really happen. We, like other NGOs, would be interested to know the rates of truancy here as part of our preventative work; it would give us more help with our programmes.”