Schools, civil servants get blame for job difficulties
An expatriate teacher says he and his colleagues have faced malice in the staff room and intransigence by civil servants supposed to help them.
The teacher said many of the problems were with schools, including one where a colleague felt forced to leave her school within a month of starting.
The teacher was brought in directly by the school that employed him. He said said he was better prepared than the teacher who resigned, who had been hired by the Education Department.
However, he and his colleagues still encountered difficulties.
'The [expatriates] are not well received; some teachers will not speak to them, others are rude,' he said.
'The workload is inequitable. One woman was teaching a full eight periods a day plus after-school and on Saturday mornings - no one else does that,' he said.
The problems involved 'more than one person; it's more than one school', said the teacher. He believed that most of the complaints arose because of misunderstandings.
'No one has got these people together and said: 'Here is who they [the expatriates] are, here's what the scheme is all about. We are not a great white hope, certainly not, but we are here to help.' He said this year the teachers were in addition to a school's staff, but there was still the misconception that they were taking the jobs of local people.
If the expatriates tried to talk to Education Department officials, they were met with silence or simply put off.
'There's no big overall umbrella planning or mechanism running this. There's no co-ordination or, if there is, those people aren't doing their jobs,' the teacher said.
Dr Bob Adamson, associate professor at the University of Hong Kong's Department of Curriculum Studies, said improvements should be made to the scheme, although he said it was a success.
Principals might benefit from help to understand how best to use the staff.
