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Major policy initiatives on education outlined
The two immediate issues the Government is tackling on the education front are to provide more support services to low achievers and newly-arrived children from China, the Secretary for Education and Manpower, Mr Joseph WP Wong, said today (Thursday).
Speaking at the briefing sessions to the new Legislative Council and the press after the Governor's Policy Address, Mr Wong said these programmes were among the 12 new initiatives in the education programmes, in addition of Government's substantial on-going programmes to improve education quality.
"In 1996-97, the Government will introduce more improvement measures such as the establishment of a new Student Discipline Team to provide expert support and guidance to all schools with serious discipline problems.
"Last year, we developed and implemented school-based curricula specially tailored to the needs of low achievers in ten secondary schools. We expanded this scheme to cover some 60 schools this September," Mr Wong said.
For children newly arrived from China, Mr Wong said the Government would continue to provide them with special support in the form of an enhanced induction programme (including simple English starting from this month), placement assistance, remedial teaching and counselling services.
A review on the various support services and the longer term requirement of these children will be conducted next year.
As a special effort to improve and expand the learning of Putonghua in schools, the Government aims to introduce new Putonghua curriculum from Primary One to Secondary Five in September 1998 and to have Putonghua as an independent subject in the Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examinations in the year 2000.
On civic education, Mr Wong said the Government was developing new guidelines and a framework to enable schools to develop their programmes either as an independent subject or a cross-curricular programme.
"They will be available by September 1996. These will give students among other things, a better knowledge of the Basic Law and China's social and political system," he said.
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