year. This will also be used experimentally for reformatory school boys in the last stage before release on licence. A second reformatory school is now in the active planning stage: this new school is badly needed to meet the growing demand for reformatory treatment and will be at Kau Wa Keng, above the Lai Chi Kok Hospital on the north-west edge of Kowloon.
43. The staff of the Castle Peak Boys' Home was below establishment throughout the year. It has places for a hundred and fifty boys and accommodated an average of a hundred and twelve; but the expansion of recent years has severely cut down the accommodation available for trade training, which is now cramped and inadequate in relation to its importance. Plans for the new trade training block have now been put forward; here the revised and more effective instruction imparted to the boys nowadays will have a better chance to make its full impact. Changing social patterns have influenced the syllabus, and trades like electrical and radio repairing now appear in the curriculum. The educational section has benefited since some of its supervisors attended in-service training courses run by the Education Department, and a balanced programme of classroom training complements more informal social activities and periods of pure recreation--all with the single intent of strengthening character and adjustment to at least reasonable conformity with the demands of the society to which the boys will return. One of many features of the Home that emphasize the healthy normality of its atmosphere is its flourishing scout troop and wolf cub pack and its energetic entries into the Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme. These are not (as in some areas) essentially 'upper middle class' activities in Hong Kong. A new superintendent has coincided in the winter with the inauguration of a careful dosage of rethinking and gentle 'modernization' in a number of ways, such as any institution of this type must have at intervals if it is to keep up with changing social conditions.
44. Under the present law a boy is committed for a maximum period of five years' training, or until he is 18, whichever comes the sooner, although he must stay for a minimum of two years in the Home, after which he is eligible to be discharged on licence. On the average boys stay between two and two and a half years, so that the period of licence or aftercare has to form an important and integral part of the rehabilita- tion process at which the system aims. Supervision after discharge is the responsibility of two designated area officers from the Probation Service, one on the Island and one in Kowloon, who therefore work in, and should know intimately, the areas where the boys have their homes.
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