Education Bureau failed to safeguard future of DSS school
The relocation of St Margaret's Girls' College from Caine Road to Sha Tin and its phased closure over five years has attracted wide-ranging comment.
The relocation of St Margaret's Girls' College from Caine Road to Sha Tin and its phased closure over five years has attracted wide-ranging comment.
Some see another manifestation of the property bubble and avaricious landlords; others bemoan the demise of a school that integrates ethnic minorities into Hong Kong's Chinese culture while providing excellent opportunities for local Chinese students to develop their English, and a French cultural affairs attaché is dismayed that a school teaching the language of Voltaire will close. All these perspectives are valid but perhaps the most important issue is that of government accountability.
The precarious nature of St Margaret's location on Caine Road was noted four years ago in Audit Commission Report No 55. The commission recommended that the secretary for education should take "proactive action" to secure the future of the two Direct Subsidy Scheme (DSS) schools, one was St Margaret's, that did not have permanent premises.
In response, the Education Bureau gave an assurance that their future would be safeguarded.
The bureau now likes to say that its response commits it to no more than a discussion with St Margaret's on how it could apply through one of the school allocation exercises, but actually it was much more than that. St Margaret's would "be required to submit proposals to deal with the issue"; not "asked to" or "requested to" but "required to". The bureau has the authority to require a DSS school to manage itself properly, it hasn't exercised that power, and now 450 students will pay the price.
The irony is that since the Audit Commission report, there has never been a school allocation exercise for which St Margaret's was eligible. There have been multiple exercises for kindergartens, primary schools, and self-financed international schools but only one for secondary schools, and in that exercise the successful school had to surrender its existing site to the government and St Margaret's had no site to surrender.