My Take | Shameful lesson in education spending
- We may disagree over the myriad ways we are failing our youth, but there is one thing we can all agree on: we don’t put sufficient cash into their futures
Hong Kong has radicalised a whole generation of young people. Officials may labour under the illusion that they spend lots of money on education which delivers good outcomes, at least as measured by international benchmarks such as Pisa, or the Programme for International Student Assessment, a worldwide study administered by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
However, by many other matrices, the city lags seriously behind many Asian developed countries and OECD economies. That is according to a recent study from the research office of the Legislative Council.
Some of our low rankings are quite shocking. Last year, Hong Kong ranked 20th out of 63 economies in terms of investing in and developing home-grown talent; and 53rd in total public expenditure on education in the same report by the International Institute for Management Development.
On education resources spent on secondary students, the city ranked 30th on education per pupil and was rated 27th in the pupil-teacher ratio. Meanwhile, the 2019 Global Innovation Index ranked Hong Kong 48th in education among 129 economies. Those are not results to write home about.
To improve on those rankings in the coming years and decades, the government will have to spend a lot more on education
In absolute terms, we may be spending more today than at the beginning of the decade, from HK$60.7 billion to HK$112.3 billion. But as a percentage of total public expenditure, public education spending has declined, from 20.1 per cent in 2010-2011 to 15.4 per cent in the current budget year.
