6
1/52 20. The first relates to Mrs. Chow's
-cent
art
bissessional primary schools.
point about
We have set
up
an
inter-departmental working group which will try to identify
realistically the various phases by which the policy of
unisessionalism in primary schools can be implemented.
1. The second area of improvements I have in mind
relates to teacher preparation and language improvement.
It
is now our aim to increase our teacher training capacity to
enable 80% of graduate teachers to be professionally trained
by 1994, and 90 in
90€ the longer term; to provide degree
courses and graduate teacher posts for practical, technical
and cultural subjects; to introduce a degree course for
heads and senior teachers
teachers of primary schools and special
schools; and to seek funds for the provision of one
additional graduate teacher of Chinese in each of the larger
secondary schools. Mrs. Fan mentioned her disappointment
that we had not yet managed to find the resources for this.
I fully share her disappointment on this point and will do
my best to obtain funds for this as soon as I can.
Jax
72.
A third area where we
hope to
introduce
improvements is with floating classes. Mrs. Pauline Ng would
I Cher
like to see them abolished.
afraid they are likely to
be with us for some time, mainly because of the geographical
imbalance in the demand for school places. As a general
rule, parents much prefer to have their children
children educated
some distance to
-
near home rather than having them travel
schools with--available places. However, even allowing for
this constraint, there is room for considerable improvement