Vague guidelines, not lack of funding, blamed for Hong Kong schools’ failure to develop ethnic minority students’ language skills
- Schools are entitled to supplemental funding based on the number of students from ethnic minority groups they teach, but many do not fully take advantage of the money
- Meanwhile, ethnic minority students’ Chinese language skills lag, with unclear guidelines and a lack of training not helping matters, a local NGO says
Hong Kong education authorities have been urged to issue clearer guidelines on the use of supplemental funding for students from ethnic minority groups after schools were found to have underutilised the resources, leaving pupils with insufficient language skills to achieve their full potential.
Hong Kong Unison highlighted the problem as it released a new study on Tuesday, pointing to policies in Canada, Finland and Germany that ensured students from ethnic minority backgrounds had sufficient instruction in the local language to help them fully integrate into society.
Summing up the situation faced by such students, Unison programme manager Payal Biswas said: “Fifteen years of education, and they still reach only a Primary One level of Chinese, which is actually a disservice, and discrimination for these students.”
One of the issues flagged by the NGO was related to government funding automatically granted to schools with students who belong to ethnic minority communities.
Public and directly subsidised schools can receive between HK$151,050 and HK$1.5 million (US$19,365 to US$192,300) a year in supplemental funding depending on the number of non-Chinese speaking students they have.
But despite the amount of such funding increasing by 87 per cent between 2015 and 2020 – from nearly HK$250 million to more than HK$450 million – a government report in March found that about a fifth of benefiting schools used less than 70 per cent of the grants.
There were 28,711 ethnic minority students in Hong Kong schools in the 2020-21 academic year, according to the Education Bureau.
One of the reasons behind the underutilisation of the government funding was the lack of clear guidelines on how schools should use the money to support their students, said Unison’s executive director, Phyllis Cheung Fung-mei.