As expected, the Education Commission has proposed that secondary education in Hong Kong should be six-years long and have a three-three structure - three years' junior and three years' senior education. The corollary of this proposal, which is very likely to get the go-ahead, is that the universities will fulfil their cherished ideal of adding a foundation year to their existing first degree courses, which are mostly three-years long.
Under the proposed reform, students aspiring to receive a higher education will be spared the pressure of having to sit two competitive examinations in the space of three years - O-levels in Form Five and A-levels in Form Seven. Instead, they will take only one public examination at the end of six years of secondary studies and its results will be used by both employers and tertiary institutions to measure their achievement.
New subjects Apart from educational considerations, the reform will have symbolic significance, entailing the abolition of a feature of Hong Kong's colonial legacy. The five-two-three structure of secondary and tertiary courses is a peculiar English invention and finds few parallels elsewhere. While there is no suggestion that the English model should be scrapped for political reasons, it has long been criticised for being unnecessarily elitist and for encouraging the early streaming of students into the arts and science streams.
In England, the system's narrowness is overcome by reforming the O-level curriculum to embrace project skills and broadening the A-level syllabus through introducing new subjects at the Advanced Supplementary level. However, similar attempts in Hong Kong to introduce Intermediate Level subjects have met with failure. Most schools and students still devote their time and energy to teaching and learning just two or three subjects at A-level, considering this a more certain means of gaining a ticket to higher education.
For most educationists in Hong Kong, the desired direction of reform is to align our system with those of the United States, Canada and Australia, where many local students go to pursue higher studies and where the six-four structure - six years' secondary and four years' tertiary - has long been the norm. It is also the model long-adopted on the mainland and in Taiwan, with which Hong Kong shares similar cultural values.
In fact, for many years, the six-four model was alive in Hong Kong. For decades, the Chinese University used to have a four-year structure, drawing students from Chinese middle schools which ran six-year courses and used Chinese as the teaching language. It was not until the late 1980s that, at the behest of the Government, they were forced to conform with the English model in the interest of forging a common entry point for tertiary studies at Form Seven. But supporters of the six-four model have never given up their fight and the universities have all since declared that they want to add an extra year.