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for appointment locally to its technical and professional services, that Government
departments should undertake the responsibility for providing professional and other
apprenticeships which must supplement and make effective the work that educational
institutions can do. We would venture to ask for the early consideration of this issue by Government, as we are convinced that it is on this that the success or failure of the new
Colonial policy will depend. The great increase of applications from inhabitants of the Colonies for admission to technical and professional courses in England is already a difficult problem. Training institutions in Great Britain cannot accept more than a fraction of such applications and it is now accepted policy that the Colonies must equip themselves to give the basic general and technical training in their own territories and that institutions in Great Britain hereafter should limit admission to such people as have completed basic courses in their own homelands add are thought to be competent to take higher courses of study or of practical laboratory or workshop training. Hong Kong already can do much but a very great expansion of training facilities is needed at once.
Application of revised Salary Scales.
29.
A necessary corollary of all this is that having proposed what we regard as adequate salary scales for properly trained and qualified men, we cannot recommend tho indiscriminate application of these scales to all existing holders of posts. Intelligent application of knowledge gained through long experience frequently has proved of greater value than specific training, though we would hesitate to assert that this is universally true. It will therefore be for the Government to decide what proportion of the new rates of pay should be permitted to officers technically unqualificd and what weight should be given in such cases to the value of expericnec. On this matter the Commission is not competent to make specific proposals, but we cannot but be aware that the rates we propose are bound to be found too high in specific cases, just as we arc aware that it is dangerous to pay, as at preset, at coolic rates of pay, men who arc in charge of the investigation of applications for free food issues. can only suggest tentatively that apart from exceptional cases no unqualified officer should be allowed to progress more than two thirds of the way along the incremental scales proposed for qualified officers and that where local training facilities exist and unqualified officers are in the carly stages of their official careers an efficiency bar should be inserted in the scale beyond which they cannot pass until they obtain the requisite qualifications.
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Employment of Local Residents.
30.
.
We
In the new basic salaries we are proposing, we have contemplated the employment of genuine Hong Kong candidates whose roots are in the Colony and we recommend
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