Have Hong Kong’s education officials lost their minds?

Sooner or later, preferably the former, someone needs to undertake the bureaucratic equivalent of psychoanalysis of the Education Bureau. We can leave aside the recent bizarre behaviour of the minister, Eddie Ng Hak-kim, in reporting to the Security Bureau that he was being followed. There is a deeper problem, as illustrated by the saga of the Territory-wide System Assessment (TSA), and this is only the latest example.

For as long as I have been in Hong Kong, most of those in government dealing with education have had an intense dislike of international schools. This animosity reached a crescendo when mention was made of the English Schools Foundation (ESF), which the old education department (now absorbed into the bureau) loathed with a passion.

There was some justification for holding a grudge when the ESF was first established. The classes were smaller, there were more and better facilities than in local schools, and the full cost was covered by the government which meant that the subsidy per pupil was very much higher. This anomaly was later corrected and the system changed to parity of subsidy per child, with the higher costs covered by fees.

READ MORE: ESF fees soar 22 per cent for new pupils as Hong Kong government subsidy is phased out

Despite the introduction of ESF fees, many local parents – including civil servants, some of whom were themselves working in the education sector – opted to send their children to schools in the ESF/international stream rather than make them endure the rigours of local ones.

As a former chief secretary told a lunch of International Business Committee members, “The education department sees the popularity of international schools as an indictment of their own work with local schools”, going on to add, sotto voce, “which of course it is”. I was sitting next to him and silently applauded his candour.

The education officials kept up their assault on the ESF subvention, arguing that it was unfair to international schools because they received no subsidy. The obvious remedy to that would, of course, have been to introduce a similar subsidy to the international schools, which could have been justified on the grounds that the majority of children attending were from local families. But that might have wiped out the local school sector altogether and no one was ready to go that far.

READ MORE: TSA row provides an opportunity to reshape Hong Kong’s learning environment

The anti-subvention campaign was maintained even after all three candidates in the 2012 chief executive election pledged in writing to maintain it. Finally, agreement was reached to scrap the subsidy and it is in the process of being phased out.