The Hong Kong Education System
Appendix C
Selection and Allocation Procedures
There are up to seven points in a child's progress through the
school system in Hong Kong at which selection or allocation procedures
(or both) affect his future to some degree. Some are crucial in their
effect and may well have determined certain prevalent attitudes towards the
school system as a whole and given rise to undesirable practices which have
become deeply ingrained among teachers, parents and pupils alike. This
problem is not in itself unique to Hong Kong; wherever educational selection
is necessary, the principles governing choice and the mechanism by which
decisions are made will inevitably cause controversy and dissatisfaction in
some quarters and invoke basic questions of social and political justice.
But the problem is particularly intense in Hong Kong so much so, that
the 1980 Green Paper on Primary Education and Pre-primary Services has
placed it in sharp focus and made specific proposals to relieve its ill
effects. This is not to say that the government has failed or refused to
recognise the problem until recently rather that the options available
at earlier stages did not seem likely to improve matters.
2.
As pointed out in chapter 2, selection and allocation procedures
affect a child when he enters a kindergarten, when he enters a primary school,
when he is allocated a Form I place, when he proceeds from junior secondary
to senior secondary education (effective from 1981), when he enters a sixth
form, and when he proceeds to tertiary education. For many sixth-form
students undergoing two-year courses there is also the intermediate step of
the Higher Level examination or other external examinations at the end of
the first year of the course. Much of the reported stress at the upper end
of the school system is the lot of students throughout the world, given that
tertiary education is rarely able to meet the aspirations of all who seek it,
and it therefore has to be accepted to a certain extent as a universal by-product
of competition. Yet even at this level Hong Kong students face particular