Improving the quality of education is arguably the most important task facing the Government. The seventh Education Commission report, by Professor Rosie Young Tse-tse, is aimed at achieving improvements via a radical approach in which the emphasis is placed on incentives to improve all school performance, with quality indicators set by schools themselves.
As interpreted by Professor Young, that may be no bad thing. Reasonably, she points out that teaching staff know more about the realities of their own institution than officials who operate at a distance. Rather than commercialising education, she believes the system takes into account the human trait of responding best to praise and recognition. Give schools greater autonomy, set benchmarks at which they should aim and by which they will be judged, then reward them for achievement, and all will be well; that is the gist of the report.
Those recommendations are difficult to fault, but they do contain flaws, unless her own idealistic vision is closely followed by those responsible for initiating the process. This would ensure that rewards - not necessarily monetary - were earned for other improvements besides academic performance. The 'value-added' component would acknowledge progress in schools which cut truancy rates, or excelled in music or physical education.
The key to this lies in improved teacher training schemes and hiring clerical workers to release staff from non-teaching duties. But it also relies on principals setting themselves high targets, and some may be unwilling to expose their staff to a level of challenge they might not meet. It is more realistic to have educationalists set standards, tailored to the needs and potential of each school, as the Education Department plans.
As well as money, which the Government can be expected to provide in generous terms, the scheme requires a high level of commitment from pupils' parents and the community. It does not take into account the turmoil which lies ahead as the teaching medium switches from English to Cantonese, with all the resistance that needs to overcome for that transition to run smoothly. But language is a crucial factor, and one which is much more likely to concentrate teachers' minds in the year ahead than somewhat ethereal ideas of self-improvement.
