One issue we will hear more about this year is the government's school-based management (SBM) system. Its aim is to involve teachers, parents, alumni and other members of the community in managing individual, publicly funded schools. This will allow schools more flexibility and independence in personnel, finance, teaching and curriculum, and provide more transparency in how public funds are used.
Experience elsewhere in the world shows that SBM can work. However, it takes responsibilities away from existing school managements, and it is encountering fierce resistance. The Catholic and Episcopalian churches are opposed to it, and have even said they might withdraw sponsorship from some schools.
They claim that their management structures already offer the benefits of SBM, while the new system will sideline churches by strengthening the link between the government and the new management bodies. They also say newly elected managers might be too inexperienced to handle the legal and other responsibilities.
The government tries to reassure the churches, saying they (or other sponsoring bodies) can nominate 60 per cent of the members of management committees, and that schools' existing religious values will remain unchanged.
In the past, leftist 'patriotic' schools were excluded from public recognition. Some of those schools' supporters are in favour of the SBM policy, prompting some in the Christian churches to suspect a plot to reduce their influence in education - and maybe society as a whole.
I went to a Catholic school and am grateful for the care and teaching I received. I would certainly never support a policy designed to damage the quality or ethos of those schools. SBM, like mother-tongue teaching, dates back to British colonial times. It has nothing to do with the 1997 handover, and everything to do with the effectiveness of publicly funded schools.
