The IT Innovation Lab in Secondary Schools Programme aims to provide more resources for secondary schools to conduct extracurricular activities to enable students to benefit from the new innovation and technology areas, Secretary for Innovation & Technology Nicholas Yang said today.

Mr Yang told reporters the programme is an extension and an expansion of the existing Enrichment IT Programme in Secondary Schools, which was launched in 2015-16 targeting eight schools with activities opened to all secondary schools on a voluntary basis.

“What surprised us is that the activities were participated by over 140 secondary schools.

“Through that experience, we decided this extracurricular activity is actually very helpful to the secondary school students.”

The Financial Secretary in his 2019-20 Budget announced the Government will deploy $500 million to implement the IT Innovation Lab in Secondary Schools Programme in the coming three school years.

The I&T chief also noted it is not the policy's intention to increase any resources constraints on secondary schools.

“We want to provide more resources to the secondary schools so that they can conduct more extracurricular activities that will enable students to benefit from the new innovation and technology areas."

Mr Yang added if any schools want to embrace this kind of initiative into their curricular portion, the Innovation & Technology Bureau will work with them and the Education Bureau to see how it can be done.