CO129-603-2 Education Department- revised grant code 5-4-1948 - 6-1-1949 — Page 39

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In accordance with the suggestion in paragraph 6 of the Governor's Despatch No.166 of the 14th July 1948 (3), a meeting was held in the Colonial Office on Wednesday the 22nd September, 1948 in order that the Bishop of Hong Kong might be able to put forward his proposals in the rsence of Mr. Rowell, Director of Education, Hong Kong.

2. During preliminary remarks the Bishop agreed that it would not be to the advantage of education in Hong Kong that the present Code which had been in operation for a comparatively short time since the end of the war, should be scrapped and a new Code formulating a fresh method of calculating grants, e.g. a block grant, be introduced.

3.

After further discussion it became clear that the Bishop's objections were based on two Code clauses, namely, Clause 3 which apparently confined the management of a school to an individual "correspondent" and Clause 37 which restricted the amount of school subscriptions (or "extras" as they might be termed) that could be collected in addition to school fees.

4. Clause 3 had appeared in the 1941 Code as amended in 1946-47, but Clause 37 was new (i.e. included for the first time in the revision of the 1946-47 Code now proposed), and had, according to Mr. Rowell been introduced in order to check the abuse of over charging parents of children attending private schools.

5. Before the introduction of the proposed Clause 37 the close scrutiny of items of expenditure by the Education Department which was apparently required by the system in Hong Kong was extremely irritating and restricted the exercise of a sense of responsibility by the Boards of Managers of the Anglican Schools. (The building up of this sense of responsibility was a feature of the Anglican Schools to which the Bishop attached the greatest importance). However, so long as the amount of subscription which could be collected (over and above school fees) was not limited, a financial margin was thus provided within which the Board of Managers had scope for exercising responsib- ility. The proposed Clause 37 would remove that margin and thereby render an already irritating situation intolerable.

B

The Bishop was therefore asking to receive block grants for his schools and, if a Code which would allow of this could not be formulated, to be placed outside the Code.

6. The Bishop made it quite clear that he had no complaint about the amount of grant which he received, in fact he considered the grants to secondary schools to be unduly generous, so much so that he was prepared to sacrifice between $100,000 and $150,000 annual grant in order to gain more freedom. This surplus amount he considered could be better applied to improving primary education.

7. After much discussion it became clear that the dispute between the Bishop and the Education Department involved no educational principle and it appeared to those at the meeting that the matter could best be solved in Hong Kong, to which the Director of Education was returning the following

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