Schools boss says room to improve
EDUCATION director Mr Dominic Wong Shing-wah marked ''must try harder'' on the report card of Hongkong's schools yesterday when he ordered more leadership.
Although some schools merited a B-plus or even an A grade, improvements had to be made throughout the education system to raise the quality and effectiveness of schooling, he said.
''Schools must have strong leadership, clear goals, high expectations, teacher dedication, efficient systems of monitoring pupils' developments and enhancing their performance, and arrangements for staff development through in-service education and training,'' Mr Wong told a conference of more than 50 government school assistant principals.
Later he insisted that many extra resources had been provided to government and aided schools and that everything was in place for improvements to be made.
''All that remains is for the people involved to get interested. A lot depends on that,'' he said.
''If you expect mediocrity, you end up having mediocrity. You must focus on high expectations which are realistic.
''Most schools are generally effective and they do their work very well or well. What we are stressing is that performance at an ordinary level is not the standard we should accept.
''There is certainly room for improvement in many schools.'' He hoped there would be more applicants for the School Management Initiative scheme whereby schools took greater control of their finances and day-to-day running.
Only 34 schools are taking part in the two-year-old scheme, but Mr Wong predicted that at least another 50 would join in September, when the initiative becomes open to primary as well as secondary schools.
Delegates to the conference, organised by the Association of Assistant Principals of Government Secondary Schools, were told to become more businesslike by another speaker, Mr Chris Pickles, the group quality adviser for Hongkong Telecom.
The education world was under pressure to change because of the altering demands of industry, but one problem faced by teachers was that often students and parents did not know what they wanted from schools.
Assistant principals should try to identify goals, ways of achieving them and ways to check to see if they had been attained, he said.
Mr Pickles said: ''There is a need to do something different and if you wait for the top-down process from government then you are missing an opportunity.''
