Hong Kong schools struggling to teach Chinese to ethnic minority students, sparking calls for more government funding to tackle problem

Three in five teachers are not confident in teaching Chinese to ethnic minority students, a survey has found, sparking calls for schools to be given more support.

The poll, commissioned by the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), also showed that 93 per cent of primary school principals said they had difficulty in employing staff with relevant skills to teach Chinese as a second language.

The survey results were released on Monday ahead of the government’s budget next month. In the policy address last year, the government proposed allocating more money to schools with an intake of fewer than 10 non-Chinese speaking students, from HK$50,000 (US$6,410) annually per school to up to HK$300,000.

But the University of Hong Kong scholars and Oxfam researchers who conducted the survey said the support measures were not enough, and that the government should further increase funding to schools and consider setting up a coordinator position to centralise support for non-Chinese-speaking pupils.

The poll, conducted between February and June last year, collected responses from 121 primary school principals and 1,230 teachers. It covered more than 40 per cent of primary schools with non-Chinese-speaking students. There were nearly 10,000 non-Chinese-speaking students studying at local primary schools in the 2018-19 year.