Hong Kong's village schools make a comeback
An influx of cross-border students is giving a handful of struggling village schools a new lease of life, writes Elaine Yau
Surveying the flurry of construction work at his village school, Chu Kwok-keung feels more than a little vindicated. The principal of Ta Ku Ling Ling Ying Public School, Chu is looking forward to having extensions to accommodate a much bigger intake of pupils in the new academic year.
They will have more classrooms, and proper facilities including a library and teachers' room.
Many are labours of love by villagers who raised money to build a school
Located near the Shenzhen border, the school currently runs just six classes, one for each primary level. But come September, Chu says, they will have 128 pupils entering Primary One, which will have four classes.
The public school is among six village schools in the border catchment areas of Yuen Long and North District (covering Sheung Shui, Fanling and Sha Tau Kok) which were allocated HK$114.5 million between them for expansion and refurbishment in the past year.
It's a reversal of fortunes for village schools, which bore the brunt of closures in a government drive to consolidate underutilised schools. Eighty six publicly funded primary schools were forced to close between 2005 and 2012 because they could not enrol the minimum 16 students for two consecutive years. Of the 100 village schools in operation a decade ago, only about 10 remain.
But a swelling stream of cross-border students in recent years - children born in Hong Kong to mainland parents or who live on the mainland with Hong Kong parents - has now given the surviving schools an enormous boost. Shan Tsui Public School in Sha Tau Kok, for example, now has an enrolment of more than 200 pupils, 90 per cent of whom are cross-border children, says principal Siu Hong-cheung.