The number of schoolchildren continues to decline. The Secretary for Education, Cai Ruolian, said earlier that he would stabilize teaching development through resettlement, merger, and closure. Deng Fei, a member of the Legislative Council and vice-chairman of the Federation of Education Federations, said that the difficulty of merging schools is not the administrative arrangement, but whether the students of the merged schools are willing to study at the new school. There is no need to choose individual schools. Hung Wai Seng, the principal of SKH Tin Shui Wai Ling Oi Primary School, said that there is an established mechanism for allocating places to secondary schools. Whether or not individual schools are selected depends on the wishes of the parents, which is difficult to be controlled by the government. He also believes that government schools have always merged when there is a shortage of students. It will also be relatively easy to deal with for larger school sponsoring groups.
The Hong Kong Secondary Schools Council and the 18 District Secondary School Principals Association wrote a letter to Cai Ruolian a few days ago, suggesting that the number of secondary schools to be opened should be frozen, and the number of allocated places per class should be adjusted according to the flexibility of the population of each district. Deng Fei pointed out in this program “Saturday Accountability” that the practice of freezing classes can only “cough in the short term” for the admission problem. In the long run, more overseas students must be introduced, otherwise the population of schoolchildren will continue to decline, which will only make Hong Kong’s education brand He suggested introducing students from Southeast Asia or the Mainland to pay full fees to study in local schools, starting with private and DSS schools, and then exploring the expansion to subsidized schools.
Kong Weicheng mentioned in the same program that the population of schoolchildren is declining, and the implementation of voluntary class reduction in primary schools is a good practice for the education ecology.