WHEN Chris Patten included education as being part of the great Hong Kong success story in his speech at the Trade Development Council's annual dinner in London on Wednesday, Sansan Ching must have choked.
''Theoretically, a local child need not have gone to kindergarten in order to enter Primary One, but that's absolute nonsense. You simply cannot survive the first week without that grounding, because you have to be able to copy the homework instructions on the blackboard into your handbook.
''You also have to be snappy when the teacher tells you to get out this or that textbook and be able to follow a whole heap of other instructions. The last year of kindergarten is devoted to all that. It's called 'orientation'.'' The director of the Hong Kong Council of Early Childhood Education and Services (CECES) does not bother to hide her bitter frustration. All those years of campaigning, and still the same mess.
Next week, CECES will issue the first bound copies of its recently published report on the training needs of Hong Kong's pre-school workforce: the teachers and helpers engaged by kindergartens and child care centres.
It is a document which should be studied assiduously by the Governor and anybody else who claims to have Hong Kong's best interests at heart, because most of it is frankly horrifying.
The author is Professor Marjory Ebbeck of the University of South Australia, who was in Hong Kong on sabbatical leave early in the year. What she found was that the economic miracle known as Hong Kong was 20 years behind developed countries in early childhood teaching and caring qualifications.