Secondary-only schools that offer vocation-oriented teaching are an unexpected casualty of the new academic system that extends free education from nine to 12 years.
Educators say the system - six years of primary and six years of secondary schooling instead of six primary and three junior secondary as before - means pupils spend more time at school, better preparing them for future work and further studies.
But it has left secondary-only direct-subsidy schools struggling to find students and looking for ways to stay afloat. Three of the four such schools in the direct-subsidy system have suffered drastic drops in enrolment. The problem arises from a new class structure that no longer produces an excess of Form Three graduates for the schools to draw from, and from the impending scrapping of the Form Five public examination - the Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination (HKCEE) - that once yielded a supply of repeaters seeking a second shot at the test.
The additional three years' free education at government schools has also lessened the appeal of direct-subsidy schools, which charge fees.
'When we went last year to schools to promote [our school] to Form Three students, the response was tragic,' Lee Kwok-wai, principal of Caritas Charles Vath College in Tung Chung, said. The college, set up in 2003, could attract only two classes of 30 Form Four students for the present academic year, compared to six classes of 40 the year before.
At most schools, under the previous class structure, five or six Form Three classes were whittled down to four Form Four classes. But under the new structure, the same number of students will progress from Form One all the way to Form Six.
