A CHILD welfare group has recommended that kindergarten teachers be provided with more training before they actually start teaching, following a survey released yesterday on training and early childhood workforce in Hong Kong.
The Hong Kong Council on Early Childhood Education and Services (CECES) suggested that the current model of in-service teacher training for pre-schools should be changed to one based on pre-service with in-service training.
A two-year, full-time, pre-service diploma, should be the basic training towards a full professional qualification in both child-care and kindergarten.
Also the Government should set up or subsidise, for at least three years, some model early childhood centres, which provide integrated services for children from birth to five or six years of age.
The centres should be models in areas such as curriculum, staffing and standards of good early childhood practice.
Investigations on the current courses and their relationship to service provision, as well as the existing training curriculums and how these programmes matched were included in the survey.