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EDUCATION
Contracts for apprentices engaged in non-designated trades or for apprentices aged over 18 engaged in designated trades may also be registered voluntarily.
The Apprenticeship Section of the Technical Education and Industrial Training Depart- ment is responsible for administering the ordinance. Its duties include advising and assisting employers in the training and employment of apprentices, ensuring that the training is properly carried out, helping to resolve disputes arising out of registered contracts, and co-operating with educational institutes to ensure that apprentices receive the necessary complementary technical education. Courses of instruction for apprentices, normally on a part-time day-release basis, are provided at the Hong Kong Polytechnic and the technical institutes.
Apprenticeship contracts registered in 1987 totalled 4 800, of which 960 were for non-designated trades. These contracts covered 4 050 craft apprentices and 750 technician apprentices. By the end of the year, 9 800 apprentices were being trained in accordance with the ordinance.
Vocational Training for the Disabled
Vocational training and support services for disabled people are provided by the Technical Education and Industrial Training Department.
The department administers two government and subvents three skills centres for disabled trainees with a total capacity of 756 places and boarding facilities for 30 per cent of the trainees. These skills centres offer two broad groups of courses. The first and major group prepares disabled people for open employment while the second group prepares trainees for mainstream technical education.
In addition to this training the department provides three main support services. The Vocational Assessment Section assesses a disabled person's potential and provides guidance in the selection of a suitable vocational training course. Recent research and development conducted by this section has enabled new programmes of assessment to be designed. These programmes, together with a greater use of the computer in the inter- pretation of the psychological tests, has enabled this service to be expanded by some 50 per cent.
To improve the opportunity for employment of a disabled person the Technical Aids and Resource Centre designs and manufactures about 40 technical aids and adaptations to standard equipment and machinery per year. These technical aids enable disabled people to gain employment or improve their productivity.
The third support service is an Inspectorate Unit whose services cover such areas as advice to skills centres on teaching methods, curriculum development, administration and setting training standards. It also provides guidance and counselling to about 120 disabled students in the technical institutes.
The department's annual surveys of disabled leavers from full-time courses of technical institutes and skills centres have shown a steady increase in numbers of skills centre leavers and those who enter mainstream technical institute courses. The number of leavers who fail to obtain employment is less than 15 per cent.
Teacher Preparation
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The training of non-graduate teachers for primary and secondary schools is undertaken by the three Colleges of Education - Grantham, Northcote and Sir Robert Black – and the Hong Kong Technical Teachers' College (HKTTC). All four colleges are directly financed and staffed by the government and administered by the Education Department.