More support: Secretary for Education & Manpower Professor Arthur Li announces measures to strengthen support for teachers.

Long-term support measures for teachers, like improving the establishment and initiatives to reduce their workload, will be introduced, Secretary for Education & Manpower Professor Arthur Li says.

Speaking after meeting educational bodies today, Professor Li said what teachers need is a stable working environment and what they want is to concentrate their attention on teaching.

Noting the declining birth rate has led to under-enrolment in schools and undermined the stability of a teaching career, he said teachers also face challenges like the difficulty and complexity in catering for student diversity.

Comprehensive strategies

In this connection, a comprehensive range of support measures and strategies have been mapped out to help them. They are:

* implementing specialised teaching in all primary schools and adopt the class-to-teacher ratio of 1 to 1.5. This will lead to a gradual addition of 1,120 permanent teaching posts, involving recurrent spending of $360 million;

* turn the five-year primary school curriculum leader post to permanent establishment, involving 620 teaching posts, incurring an expenditure of $330 million;

* improve the student guidance personnel-to-class ratio from 1 to 24, to 1 to 18, involving a recurrent expenditure of $220 million;

* provide additional teachers at junior levels of secondary schools which have admitted Band Three and bottom 10% students, creating over 700 permanent teaching posts, costing about $400 million;

* make the basic Capacity Enhancement Grant, at $450 million a year, a permanent provision, estimated to involve 1,000 teaching and 4,000 non-teaching posts;

* simplify the process of School-based Assessment for Chinese and English in the Certificate of Education Examination 2007 with further deliberations on whether assessment should be marked and counted in the examination;

* review the arrangements for Territory-wide System Assessment;

* improve the administrative procedures for School External Review; and,

* streamline the vetting procedures of the Quality Education Fund and make it accept applications all year round. School authorities will be asked to take teachers' workload into consideration before submitting proposals.

Stable working environment

Professor Li said making support measures permanent can offer teachers with a more stable working environment, whereas strengthening the teacher establishment and improving student guidance personnel service can help them better cater for student diversity.

"With additional teachers, schools can adopt group teaching according to students' ability. As a matter of fact, the improved teacher-to-student ratio means that schools can practise small class teaching, where necessary," he added.

On teachers' pressure, Professor Li said the Committee on Teachers' Work is looking into the problem from an independent perspective, adding recommendations will be made within this year.