Profit comes before quality teaching in many local pre-schools

TEACHING young children can be a joy. Let them create stories using their imaginations, and learning and playing become the same fun experience. But how can you do that when you have 50 three-year-olds in one room? Hong Kong's kindergartens come in chains, a bit like supermarkets, producing early education on a massive scale. Up to 50 to a class, over 600 to a school, more than 10 schools to a chain, is common. This year's stories of over-enrolment and over-charging also indicate many operate with profit as the primary incentive.

One in five kindergartens for three to five-year-olds had more children than they should this school year, according to the Education Department. The situation led to the police being called in to count children - 12 schools were raided at the end of May and more will be at the start of the next school term, the department says.

Lam Mei, headmistress of Cannan International Kindergarten in Kowloon Tong, was fined $10,000 in April for running an unregistered school. Another two Cannan schools, one of the largest chains with 14 schools, were later found to be operating without licences.

The Ombudsman has also stepped in, to probe inspection and registration of kindergartens.

A Canadian teacher who teaches English at one of the kindergartens says 'a lot' of the schools she had worked in had taken more than their allotted number of children, and 'the reason they do that is to increase their income'.

When the schools find out inspectors are coming, they have ingenious ways of dealing with the excess pupils, from driving them around in buses until the inspectors have left to temporarily moving them to another school or even hiding them within the school being inspected - in one case a teacher pushed them into a storeroom and told them to be quiet.