Hong Kong’s education sector faces growing wastage rate

Students at St. Hilary's Primary School in Hong Kong have a class on April 19, 2022. It goes without saying that quality education for our children should include the inculcation of patriotism among our students, and there is no better place than the schools for that purpose.

Quality education requires a healthy school environment with unbiased teaching staff who promote open-mindedness rather than political bigotry. That means schools need to do a comprehensive housecleaning to get rid of the black sheep among the teaching staff, who poisoned our young students with toxic ideas or ideologies in the past, as evidenced by the fact that many teachers and students have been in illegal activities during the 2019 -- 20 riots, such as defacing the Chinese national flag, vandalizing public and private property, and storming the Legislative Council building.

From 2019 to 2021, the Education Bureau has received 445 complaints about teacher misconduct. Investigations into 311 of those cases have been completed by the bureau, and charges have been made against some of those unscrupulous teachers.

The education sector is witnessing a surge in teacher wastage, due to the problem of remnants of politicization. In May, at least 4,050 teachers, or 7.6 percent of the educator workforce, left their jobs in the current school year, according to a report from the Education Bureau. The authority must come up with workable solutions to deal with this problem and ensure that the city has enough qualified teachers to provide good education to the young people. The government should focus on recruiting more qualified teachers, as there is not much that can do to mitigate the waste rate for the time being.

According to the 2022 Good Schools Guide s talks with the principals of Hong Kong's top international schools, Francois Xavier Gabet, head of FIS, believes that teachers are carefully reviewing and seeing that Hong Kong is emerging from the epidemic and that if things were to tip back into shutdowns and harsh quarantines, that cautious optimism would soon evaporate.

The government should take into account the impacts of possible shutdowns and harsh quarantines in the education sector, as well as the conversations with principals of schools in Hong Kong.

The surge in wastage rate is a good opportunity for many talented individuals to develop a teaching career because of the combination of various factors including emigration, pandemic and other personal reasons.

The government can also help by assuring that there won't be a return to long quarantines and school closures.

The education sector's problems could have a huge impact on Hong Kong's status as an international centre of finance, trade and logistics in the long run. It is incumbent on the new special administrative region administration to tackle these problems.

Megan Cheung and Jacky Ko are members of China Retold.