Education gap threatens poor Hong Kong children
While international schools offer expensive activities, impoverished families struggle to meet the education needs of their children
To many schoolchildren, summer holidays are the time for travel and fun, but Li Wendi’s three children, aged between seven and 17, have never been to any outlying island or museum because the five-member family living in Tin Shui Wai is too poor to afford the transport costs.
The family lives solely on the monthly HK$15,000 income of Li’s husband, a freelance construction worker, which means after paying the monthly rent of HK$2,300, each family member has only about HK$85 per day to pay for food, clothes, water, electricity and other daily necessities. While some international schools offer in-town summer programmes that charge up to HK$7,000, and out-of-town summer camps costing almost HK$17,000, working-class families compete for a subsidy of just HK$1,500 per child per year to fund extracurricular activities.
“The government should subsidise poor families so their children can join afterschool activities to widen their horizon,” said Catlyn Ho Yu-ying, community organiser for the Alliance for Children Development Rights. “Otherwise, the education gap between children from rich and poor families will widen, pushing poor children further to the margins of society.”
Li’s family has been receiving the HK$1,500 since last year for the three children’s afterschool activities, but she said competition for it was fierce and a family was therefore unlikely to get the subsidy every year.
She used the money for her two daughters to take up dancing and her son to learn swimming for two to three months, after which the money ran out.
During summer holidays, the children have nowhere to go but the local library, because there is no museum in Tin Shui Wai. For visits to other places, it would cost Li and her three children more than HK$100 for a round trip.
“I always hope we have more money to let our children see more and learn more,” said Li. “They have been feeling inferior to their classmates, who go to so many places and learn so many skills. My two daughters are older so they understand this, but my little son often cries and asks why he cannot be like his classmates. At that point I can only bring him to a McDonald’s and buy a happy meal to comfort him.”
By comparison, Chinese International School provides summer camps to the United States, Kenya and Canada. The US trip costs HK$16,500. There is no information about the other trips. Hong Kong International School offers a summer programme in Hangzhou at a cost of HK$16,800.
Li receives a subsidy under a Social Welfare Department scheme to support youth development. Sixty per cent of the annual subsidy of HK$15 million is reserved for individual families – around HK$1,500 per child – and the rest for districts to organise youth development projects. This means that the subsidy is only enough to provide about 6,000 places for families in need.
In his policy address in January, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying said 970,000 people were living below the poverty line. In May this year, almost 250,000 families were living on social security, according to official figures.
Catlyn Ho said even the few subsidised places were not open for public applications. She said non-governmental organisations needed to submit cases to government social workers, who had the power to decide who received a subsidy. She said their considerations would include not only the financial situation of each family but also factors such as family members’ mental issues or serious illnesses, family disputes or the need for special education.
“It’s no longer a competition about how poor you are, but also about how miserable you are,” said Ho.
A department spokeswoman said this was to “ensure proper use of the resources”.
A bureau spokeswoman said the Jockey Club had a similar scheme for schools – granting HK$86 million in the 2013-14 school year to benefit over 220,000 pupils. She added that NGOs would also arrange different affordable afterschool activities.
Ho urged the government to combine the resources to provide each child receiving social security or textbook subsidies HK$200 a month to develop their interests. She said this would cover most poor families and would not require extra administrative work as both social security and textbook subsidies were means-tested.
