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II.
The July 6, 1977 Annouement
All of a sudden, the government announced on 6 July 1977 that owing to a good surplus of government primary school teachers, the government has decide to give the teachers three (3) choices: (a) to continue teaching in government primary schools with the knowledge that they may have to retire in 1980; (b) to apply for retirement before that date; or (c) to apply for another post in the Education Department or elsewhere in the civil service on the same salary scale.
The surplus is described as 650 in number, and it is anticipated that this will amount to 1,100 in 1980.
There are altogether about 1,600 government primary school teachers. They are all members of our union, As the government's decision is made secretly and all by its own without prior consultation with appropriate union. Our Union objected it strongly and called upon all civil servants unions and teachers associations to take up this matter seriously.
On 10 July, our Union held an Extraordinary General Meeting. 1,500 members attended and a 7-points declaration was made reserving our accep- tance, recognition to the government's dispersion-policy, claiming our rights to amend it, and demanding direct negotiation on the matter without delay.
Background
The July 6, 1977 announcement is not an isolated incident. This is another step taken by the government to phase out government school non- graduate teachers and their counterpart in the aided sector.
Let us go back to as far as 28 years ago, when Hong Kong was suddenly suffering from a flow of refugees pouring in from Mainland China. The next generation of this bulk of population became age-fitted for receiving primary education from 1955 onwards and the Hong Kong government was forced to launch a 10-year plan to expand primary school places in order
r to absorb these children. One thousand primary schools were scheduled to be built, but government did not want to take up the responsiblity all by herself.
In order to encourage the religious, charitable and non-profit-making bodies to run schools, a generous grant-in-aid scheme was introduced. The govern- ment would tender as much as 80% financial support to help run a primary school. So, at the end, out of the thousand primary schools, only 102 were government-run. Then came the problem of teachers. One-year course was introduced to train qualified teachers in time. And in order to encourage all these teachers to teach in grant-in-aid schools, they were paid the same salary as government school teachers. So, as we can see, the majority of primary school teachers, government and aided alike, are one-year trained teachers, and they receive the same pay.
The flow of age-fitted children was not constant.
After 1965, the number
of pupils began to drop and some of the government and aided schools were under- utilized in the sense that they could not get 45 pupils in one class and they couldn't follow the 1.1 teacher to class ratio strictly. It is anticipated that starting from 1980, the second generation will come to fill up the school places again. However, the gorernment does not want to wait. The one-year trained teachers have been used to deal with the first generation and now they shall became useless. With such a wrong idea, the economic-minded government has been taking steps ever since 1971 to phase out such teachers, or at least to find means to save as much money as possible.
/III. The Government's