Discrimination watchdog presses for action on schooling for minorities

Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying has to iron out unfair education policies affecting ethnic-minority and disabled pupils in his second policy address, or the government may face a formal investigation, the discrimination watchdog has warned.

The ultimatum came from Equal Opportunities Commission chairperson Dr York Chow Yat-ngok, who said the body could invoke its utmost power should Leung fail to tackle the issues in his January speech.

"In the case of ethnic-minority and disabled education, the situation has been worsening," Chow told the South China Morning Post. "Something must be done. We will wait until January, just to give the government some time to work on it. But if [these issues] are not addressed, we will definitely do something."

He urged Leung to spell out ways he intended to get rid of "de facto" ethnically segregated schools, a situation that the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child had condemned as discrimination.

Help for schools could include providing resources and teacher training so they could assist the children to integrate culturally and in terms of language, and offering a second-language curriculum for Chinese, he said.

About 14,000 ethnic-minority pupils are attending public schools this year. Twice that number of special-needs pupils were enrolled in mainstream schools in the last academic year.