The government has been criticised for failing to convince parents of the benefits of its mother-tongue education policy, despite an announcement this week of $1.1 billion in additional funding to boost language teaching in secondary schools.
'Parents are prejudiced in favour of sending their children to English medium schools,' said the chairman of Education Policy Concern Organisation Mervyn Cheung Man-ping. He said the extra funding, mostly for boosting English standards in Chinese-medium schools, was a step in the right direction but did not go far enough.
'It goes some way towards improving language competence in Chinese-medium schools, but will not be able to remove the differences between English-medium and Chinese-medium schools in the eyes of parents,' he said.
High-performing Chinese-medium schools were likely to switch to English instruction at the first opportunity to attract students, he said.
The funding was proposed in the final report of the Education Commission's working group on the medium of instruction for secondary schools, which was published on Monday.
The report recommends that schools review their medium of instruction every six years. To teach in English, 85 per cent of their Form One intake would need to be from the top 40 per cent of students.
Yuk Wai-yuen, principal of Leung Shek Chee College, a Chinese-medium school in Kwun Tong, said he hoped to be able to switch to English at the first review, scheduled for 2010. 'We are very close to the 85 per cent threshold at the moment,' Mr Yuk said. 'Parents want us to introduce more classes in English in Form One now, but we have to tell them we cannot break the rules.'